The Semiotic Web 1989 9783110874099, 9783110123500

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The Semiotic Web

Approaches to Semiotics 92

Editorial

Committee

Thomas A. Sebeok Roland Posner Alain Rey

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

The SemioticWeb 1989

Edited by

Thomas A. Sebeok Jean Umiker-Sebeok Assistant

Editor

Evan P. Young

Mouton de Gruyter Berlin · New York

1990

M o u t o n de Gruyter (formerly Mouton, The Hague) is a Division of Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin.

Printed on acid-free paper, (ageing resistant — p H : 7, neutral)

Deutsche Bibliothek Cataloging in Publication

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The semiotic web ... — Berlin ; New York : M o u t o n de Gruyter. ISSN 0933-6729 1989 (1990) (Approaches to semiotics ; 92) ISBN 3-11-012350-9 NE: G T

© Copyright 1990 by Walter de Gruyter & Co., Berlin, Federal Republic of Germany. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. N o part of this book may be reproduced in any form — by photoprint, microfilm, or any other means — or transmitted or translated into a machine language without written permission f r o m the publisher. Printing: Ratzlow Druck, Berlin. — Binding: Lüderitz & Bauer G m b H , Berlin. Printed in Germany.

Contents Preface

ίχ

People Halliday as Semiotician Adam Makkai

3

Alexander Bryan Johnson (1786-1867): The First Linguistic Philosopher K.T. Fann

31

The Semiotics of L6vi-Strauss: Translation as Communication Roland A. Champagne

61

The Semiotics of Luis Jorge Prieto Jeanne Martinet

89

Semiotics and Art: The Contribution of Mieczysiaw Wallis (1895-1975) Zdiszlaw Najder

109

Places Brazil: A Culture in Tune with Semiotics Lucia Santaella Braga

123

Semiotics in Colombia: Within New Perspectives Armando Silva

177

Semiotics in Peru 1980-1988 Enrique ΒαΙΙόη

195

Semiotics in Romania Mariana Net

221

Semiotics in the United States Thomas A. Sebeok

275

vi Contents

Topics Meaning, Subject, and Reality as Semiotic Foci of Political Research Pertti Ahonen

399

The Rediscovery of the Audience in Television Studies Robert C. Allen

447

Semiotics and Mass Communication Research: Key Intersections Frank Biocca

471

Psychoanalysis and Semiotics: A Retrospect Neal Bruss

531

Psychosemiotics Gary Cronkhite

547

Semiotic Approaches to Figurative Narration Pierre Fresnmdt-Deruelle

587

The Semiotics of Clothing: Linking Structural Analysis with Social Process 605 Susan B. Kaiser A Semiotic Approach to Product Forms Tetsuo Kawama

625

Bacterial (Prokaryotic) Communication Sorin Sonea

639

Photography and Semiotics David Tomas

663

Signs Before Speech Colwyn Trevarthen

689

Meetings Report of the Fourteenth Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America 759 Eleanor Donnelly Seven Finnish-Hungarian Semiotic Symposia (1985-1989) Vilmos Voigt

775

Index

779

Still from the film Cinderella (1985), written, directed, and produced by Ericka Beckman. Reproduced by permission.

Preface

Oh, what a tangled web we weave, When first we practice to deceive!' So Walter Scott wrote in 1808. In his twilight years, Peirce mused, in an unpublished manuscript (MS 318: 205, c. 1907), that the utterer and interpreter of a sign 'need not be persons; for a chameleon and many kinds of insects and even plants make their livings by uttering signs, and lying signs at that.' Arachnids utter signs, and practice what the late H.E. Hinton called 'natural deception', including mimicry and crypsis (i.e., concealment or camouflage), on an immense scale. The naturalist R.W.G. Hingston has made a special study of how the orb-weaver spiders create elaborate illusions. And, in 1976, Umberto Eco emphatically assured his flabbergasted readership that 'semiotics is in principle the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie.... I think that the definition of a "theory of the lie" should be taken as a pretty comprehensive program for a general semiotics' (A Theory of Semiotics, p. 7). Was this a kind of a response to the perennial Augustinian magna quaestio.. Δε mendacio? Eco was anticipated not only by some Saints but also by decided laics, such as the Yale philologist Edgar H. Sturtevant, who intriguingly speculated, in his 1947 introduction to linguistics, that 'language must have been invented for the purpose of lying.' Or as the philosopher Peter Caws, in 1969, put the matter the other way around, 'truth...is a comparative latecomer on the linguistic scene, and it is certainly a mistake to suppose that language was invented for the purpose of telling it.' The craft of semiotics, in its various workaday operations, is indeed widely concerned with lying or deceit, as becomes amply clear from an outpouring of recent books on the subject. Paul Ekman (whose intellectual autobiography, Ά Life's Pursuit', was featured as the opening article in The Semiotic Web for 1986), published his Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage in 1985, in which he draws deeply on his comprehensive knowledge of

χ Preface deceitful nonverbal deportment, vocal and otherwise, to say nothing of speech as another—in Freud's celebrated phrase—'mode of self-betrayal'. General and specialized handbooks on the subject abound. Machiavelli taught (maligning a crafty cousin of the dog) that 'foxiness should be well concealed: one must be a great feigner and dissembler. And men are so naive, and so much dominated by immediate needs, that a skilful deceiver always finds plenty of people who will let themselves be deceived.' Machiavelli's infamous 1532 manual of deceit had a punchy caption: II Principe. For some reason, modern authors on double-dealing seem to favor eighteenth-century-styled titles and subtitles. Sissela Bok chose Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (1978). J. Barton Bowyer is even more pervasively enumerative: Cheating: Deception in War & Magic, Games & Sports, Sex & Religion, Business & Con Games, Politics & Espionage, Art and Science (1982)—what aspect of human life is spared? What about the spider? It is curious that, although most spiders are poisonous, there are no known cases of any other animal save man mimicking a spider. On the other hand, spiders provide many instances of camouflage and special protective resemblances, so their webs have proved conveniently metaphoric. No ant, for one, mimics a spider, but a fair number of spiders imitate ants. (Both spiders and ants are arthropods, but they belong to two different major groups: spiders, along with mites, scorpions, horseshoe crabs, and the extinct eurypterids, are Chelicerata; ants are insects, belonging to the Uniramia, along with millipedes and centipedes.) Certain orb-weaving spiders, for protection from predators, even alter their surroundings: for example, one spider fabricates several organic epigones, or dummies, of itself by collecting insects it has sucked dry, forming them into heaps tinged to resemble itself. It wraps their corpses up and then dangles them from various spots on its web, thereby greatly increasing its chances of escaping attack. Little wonder that such webs sprang to Scott's mind in connection with human dissimulation! We think that webs, shining in the sunlight, are elegantly colorful—their deceptive effect due, of course, to diffracted light. Webs provide for us a satisfying emblem in the title of this series. Although spiders have a baleful reputation— especially, it seems, for Francophone readers, for whom, Mounin had told us in the pages of Semiotica, Taraign6e n'a pas une image positive' (but what about Mallarm6's memorable description of himself in 1866 as 'a sacred spider' spinning

Preface xi his thread into 'wonderful lace'?)—we believe that webs appropriately picture the worldwide community, or network, of semioticians and their activities. After all, to Wilbur the pig (in E.B. White's Charlotte's Web), his friend Charlotte A. Cavatica, a beautiful large grey spider, appeared, underneath 'her rather bold and cruel exterior', to have a kind heart; 'she was to prove loyal and true to the very end.' In his customary luxuriant prose, the late Loren Eiseley grasped at the essence of man's similitude with the orb spider, as well as their unlikeness: 'Man lies at the heart of a web, a web extending through the starry reaches of sidereal space, as well as backward into the dark recesses of prehistory.... It is a web no creature of earth has ever spun before. Like the orb spider, man lies at the heart of it, listening. Knowledge has given him the memory of earth's history beyond the time of his emergence.... Even now, one can see him reaching forward into time with new machines...until elements of the shadowy future will also compose part of the invisible web he fingers' (The Star Thrower, 1978, pp. 119f.). Mankind fabricates its web of subtle signs; the spider spins its of signifying silk. This year's Web highlights a host of colorful semiotic threads from around the world. Next year, we look forward to an equally rich array of far-flung yarns, including chapters on: —Semiotics in Africa, Bulgaria, Chile, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, and Yugoslavia; —Semiotic aspects of the works of Roland Barthes, Ernst Cassirer, Gilles Deleuze, J.R. Firth, Max Fisch, Gottlob Frege, Louis Hjelmslev, James Joyce, Immanuel Kant, Edmund Leach, Bronislaw Malinowski, Jacques Maritain, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Mounin, C.K. Ogden, Walker Percy, Roland Posner, Giorgio Prodi, Paul Ricoeur, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Josiah Royce, Edward Sapir, Cesare Segre, and Giambattista Vico; —Scientific autobiography of V.V. Ivanov; —Semiotics of Anthropology, Architecture, Brains and Ants: Natural Neural Networks, Cartography, Cognitive Sciences, Feminism, Food and Drink, Geography, Geology, Hermeneutics, Law, Logic, Mathematics, Media Aesthetics, Narrative, Nature, Poems, Pragmatics, Religion, Sign Language, Translation, and Urban Affairs and Planning. Thomas A. Sebeok Jean Umiker-Sebeok Bloomington February 1,1990

People

Halliday as Semiotician AdamMakkai

The purpose of this paper is to discuss and highlight those aspects of M.A.K. Halliday's contributions to linguistics which bear a direct relationship to semiotics. This is a wonderful opportunity to gather and write down my impressions gathered during the course of the past 23 years. I first met Halliday in June of 1966 during the LSA Summer Linguistic Institute sessions at UCLA, in a class on Stratificational Grammar offered by Sydney M. Lamb. Halliday participated in this class not as a student, of course, but as an observer and an advisor; he had established his own standing as a major international figure in linguistics by the mid-1950s, especially through his seminal paper 'Categories of the theory of grammar* (Halliday 1961). Lamb and Halliday discovered each other in the late 1950s and the early 1960s; their intellectual-scholarly collaboration continues to this day. Since few theoreticians ever acknowledge the influence of others, let alone openly discuss how and which way the winds of cross-fertilization went, I will have to devote a future, more detailed paper to the similarities and differences that exist between Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar and Lamb's Cognitive-Stratificational Linguistics.1 In order to provide maximum coverage of Halliday's views on semiotics and linguistics (the two are impossible to separate in his case), I submitted questions to Halliday in writing (from Chicago to Sydney). His answers (given in longhand) are short and to the point, and are reproduced them here—both for the benefit of the readership of The Semiotic Web, and in order to amplify these brief written responses based on two sources of information: (a) Halliday's numerous publications, and (b) the result of a full day's worth of personal discussion in Lake Forest, Illinois on May 19th, 1988, when Halliday was visiting at the University of Minnesota and kindly accepted my invitation to come down to the Chicago area by train for a full working day. I would like to express my gratitude to him for his generous help with both the written questions and the extended personal discussions. I hope that I am able to do justice to his position regarding semiotics, and will, of course, bear full responsibility for any misunderstandings or misrepresen-

4 Adam Makkai tations that might occur in this text, as there will be no time for him to read it before it is due in press.

The Questions Submitted and Halliday's Answers AM (1): In August 1975, when we gathered at Burg Wartenstein, Austria, you, along with Syd Lamb and John Regan, were co-chairmen of the sessions that eventually resulted in the two-volume book Semiotics of Language and Culture coedited by Robin Fawcett, you, Lamb, and me. Soon thereafter, in 1978, you published Language as Social Semiotic. 1975 seems, in retrospect, to have been a culmination point in your thinking. The question arises: where do we start tracing your interest in semiotics per se? Were you aware of the existence of semiotics as a student in London or in Cambridge? Were there any tutors or dons in Cambridge who might have told you about semiotics? Did your father—a teacher of Classics—mention semiotics or its Greek etymology to you? ΜΑΚΗ: Since there may be some confusion about where I was studying what, let me set the record straight once and for all. I was never an undergraduate at Cambridge, I was a post-graduate student there. My first degree, B.A. (Honors) in Chinese, is from the London School of Oriental and African Studies, but I was never really a regular 'undergraduate* there either. What happened was, you see, that I was studying there while working as instructor for the Services Unit for Language Training, a branch of the British Army. In other words, I took my B.A. (Honours) externally, but I did attend certain courses—for instance, those of Professor Walker-Simon and others. As far as I can tell, there was no specific mention of 'semiotics' by anyone I can remember during these years. You mention my father (and others, too, have thought he was a Classics professor), so here is for the record: he was not a Classics professor, but a secondary school teacher who taught English and Latin; he did not know Greek. He was an amateur dialectologist who wrote verse in Standard English as well as in the Yorkshire dialect. He is unlikely to have heard of semiotics. But to answer your question: I came across semiotics by studying Saussure, and more importantly Hjelmslev, as a post-graduate student under J.R. Firth. AM (2): Do you consider Malinowski a 'semiotician' avant la lettre, or actually aware of its existence? ΜΑΚΗ: Not in any significant sense, I think.

M.A.K. Halliday 5 AM (3): Charles Morris and C.S. Peirce are regarded as founding fathers of 'semiotics' in the United States. Whom in British philosophy, philology, or history would you regard today as possible parallel figures to Morris and Peirce? How about Wittgenstein? Was there a semiotic interest in the Vienna Circle of logicians? Carnap? Cassirer? What about Whitehead and Bertrand Russell? Would you comment on this? ΜΑΚΗ: I am no philosopher, as you know! But I would like to make one thing clear: in my own formation, and that of anyone studying linguistics (and, I imagine, many other fields also) at that time, there was no conception of 'British' scholarship as such; we were part of the European tradition and read as widely in that as we could (much less American; Firth had no patience with Bloch and Träger and not much time for Bloomfield, though he encouraged us to read Sapir and to follow closely anything written by Kenneth Pike). AM (4): By the time you published your first major article in America in Word, 'Categories in the theory of grammar', were you already a semiotician? It seems to me that a case could be made (a) that you were indeed, and (b) also that you were not yet—not entirely consciously, at any rate. Going on from here, by 1973, when you published Explorations in the Functions of Language, and 1975, the year of Burg Wartenstein, when Learning How to Mean appeared, one could hardly deny that a semiotician's heart was beating inside your chest. Would you agree with this? And lastly: when in your distinguished teaching career did you start mentioning 'semiotics' expressis verbis to students, undergraduates, graduates, and other audiences? ΜΑΚΗ: You could look at 'Categories of the theory of grammar' in a variety of ways, but—I mean, what is a semiotician? I would really rather leave others to be the judge of one's having attained 'semioticianship'.... When did I first mention semiotics in my teaching? I don't really know. But it would have been in the context of discussing Saussure and Hjelmslev. Since I dealt with both of these major writers from the very start, I must have mentioned semiotics in Edinburgh as Lecturer under Angus Mcintosh; there I was promoted to Reader (skipping Senior Lecturer). When I took the Professorship (actually the first one) at University College London, I was mentioning semiotics rather frequently, both in large lectures and in smaller post-graduate seminars. AM (5): Where, when, and from whom did you receive the most significant influence in your thinking regarding semiotics? When did the dialogue about semiotics with Lamb start? At the 1966 Summer Linguistic Institute at UCLA?

6 Adam Makkai ΜΑΚΗ: I was influenced by Syd [Lamb] from 1964 onward, though without mention of semiotics, I would imagine. But my own 'way in* was really this: I was always against the 'autonomy of linguistics', as I saw linguistics as a part of something wider—hence the attraction of Saussure's 'semiologie' . But, I must confess, I didn't like 'signs'. I certainly didn't see signetsignifiant Isignifii as a useful basis on which to ground this wider endeavor. To me semiotics has always meant the study of meaning systems and their attendant processes. Let me put it this way: studying language as a meaning system is called semantics. Studying anything else as a meaning system is called semiotics. I decided to go back to the Prague School, as I had earlier only looked at their phonology, typology, and sociolinguistics. Now I felt it was time to make a serious study of these as well as of their poetics, which I found most revealing. In so doing I also discovered, belatedly, the Russian formalists—mostly Roman Jakobson, of course; also the French Functionalists Pottier and Greimas. Also at about this time I became acquainted with the work of Rulon Wells at Yale. It was specifically from Greimas that I borrowed the term 'social semiotic'. My first use acknowledged is his 1969 paper in International Days of Sociolinguistics, 'Des modules th6oriques en sociolinguistique'; it put the 'social' into 'semiotics' for the first time, hence I could accommodate a Bernsteinian perspective on meaningsystems and their transmission. AM (6): Can your two books, Learning How to Mean (1975) and Language as Social Semiotic (1978), be jointly taken as more or less your culmination point as far as semiotics is concerned, or would you please indicate where you have taken (and been taken by) semiotics? ΜΑΚΗ: Well, I take semiotics as one of the concepts that is getting us from discipline-based thinking to thematic thinking—that is, new ideas coming out of physics, biology...far from equilibrium systems, cladistics, etc. I think my perspective is generally a semiotic one in sociolinguistics, stylistics, developmental and educational linguistics, but perhaps especially in grammar, semantics, and text linguistics; but I use language as the field of argument and the source of explanations. AM (7): Which, in retrospect, has the most 'semiotics' in it: your 'Scale and Category Theory', your 'Systemic-Functional Grammar', or your latest, 'Functional Grammar'? How could a case be made to the effect that they are all three equally semiotically based?

M.A.K. Halliday 7 ΜΑΚΗ: Frankly, I make no distinction between any of these. It would be better to say that Systemic Grammar is one variant of the wider class of Functional Grammars (here we sometimes use the compound form 'Systemic-Functional' in order to make this clear). My recent book (1984) is called Introduction to Functional Grammar simply because it leaves out the systemic level of representation. So I would not distinguish between your 'Systemic-Functional' versus 'Functional' dichotomy, but would regard them both as more 'semiotically based' than the first, 'Scale and Category Theory'. AM (8): Two related questions: the view could be developed that semiotics and linguistics are actually co-derivatives of general human cognition. Would you agree or disagree with such a historical derivation? And continuing this thought: by tracing the developments of the past 30 years or so, one could say that out of structuralism came Chomsky's Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG); as a reaction to TGG's various failures, semantically based linguistic speculation began in earnest, leading to new insights in Tagmemics, in Systemic-Functional Grammar, and in Stratificationalism as well as in Shaumyan's Applicative-Generative Grammar. Shaumyan, in fact, wrote a book called A Semiotic Theory of Language (1987). Could a case be made, then, that semiotics owes its birth in a wider sense to the fact that modern linguistics was forced to take a turn toward cognitive matters? That linguistics and semiotics may be related raises few eyebrows today, but in 1960, when I entered Yale Graduate School under Bernard Bloch, such ideas were not 'in the air', as one might say; many a question I posed in such directions was sternly rebuffed as 'irrelevant', 'teleological', etc. The interdisciplinary or 'hyphenated' areas of linguistics were much less in public consciousness than they are today. Could you please comment on how you see the connection between linguistics and semiotics as 'modern developments'? ΜΑΚΗ: Why pick 'cognition'? Do you mean co-derivatives of the study of human cognition? I would disagree, anyway. I do not think that semiotics is part of the study of cognition, although our colleague Robin Fawcett might. I think I have already answered this above. For convenience's sake, look at it in the form of a diagram (Figure 1). My particular corner in this scheme of affairs is the discipline of linguistics as the theme of semiotics. AM (9): According to Paul A. Kolers, an American psychologist, 'the Americans run an idea up the flagpole to see if anyone will salute; the British, on the other hand, prefer to let an idea get broody to see if anything will hatch' (Kolers 1969). Do you see a potential danger in that semiotics could become an

8 Adam Makkai

SEMIOTICS „ „ „„ LINGUISTICS

, \

Study of any phenomenon m and process of meaning

a s syste

/

FASHION, etc.

(Other Art Forms) Fig. 1. American bandwagon, something like Chomsky's TGG was in the 1960s? Or is the international spread of semiotics sufficiently wide to divert such a danger? What encroachments, if any, has one been able to perceive in the name of semiotics? ΜΑΚΗ: There will always be bandwagonry, of course; the ritual bow to Peirce has been a feature of America[n semiotics] in the 1980s. So—yes, there is that danger, and it may cause the name 'semiotics' to be abandoned. But the enterprise will survive because it faces squarely into the future. AM (10):

Is semiotics a self-curing discipline, like certain modern brands of

self-cleaning ovens and self-defrosting refrigerators? Engels, in his The State, Family and Private Property (everyone's obligatory reading in Eastern Europe and China), predicts that the State as such will disappear someday. As a self-confessed monarchist-Marxist-semiotician, do you see the future of semiotics as quasi-totalitarian, quasi-self-effacing, or harmlessly middle-of-the-road? ΜΑΚΗ: Good question! It [semiotics] is already taking over Marxism (again, I stress that I don't know what 'it [the resulting thematic amalgam] will be called in the next century—note, e.g., the total disappearance of the term 'cybernetics', although the concept is now universal); future progress will depend on solving the problem of the semiotic dialectic known in linguistics as 'realization'. AM (11):

Both Chomsky and Lamb have been criticized for using suggestive

symbolisms. Chomsky's symbols—the rewrite rule, the asterisk, the synchronic rewrite rule, etc.—have all had definite unconscious power over the thinking of linguists. Lamb's relational networks have been mocked as 'spaghetti', 'junglegym', 'laminations', etc. It is suggested in each case that the theory would be different were it to use plain expository prose (C.F. Hockett's position). Do you

M.A.K. Halliday 9 think Systemics could have affected people differently if you hadn't invented relational networks? I once said that 'Systemic-Functional Grammar and Tagmemics look like huge Stratificational Grammars lying on their sides.' Alas, the quip was picked up and echoed by many. How wrong was I? ΜΑΚΗ: I don't know. One can overdo this sort of thing. The ideology is in my view much more in the grammar used to construe the theory than in the diagrams and symbols scratched on the surface. (I mean the cryptogram mar, of course.) AM (12): Is semiotics safe from the 'tyranny of symbolisms' precisely because it studies symbols and, therefore, can create them as quickly as it can destroy earlier or bad ones? ΜΑΚΗ: Well—it has emphasized reflexiveness; that is its best defense. AM (13): Older scholars trained in classical rhetoric frequently claim that everything we say and do is traceable back to Aristotle's Rhetoric. Are you willing to agree with such 'Hellenomaniacal' statements? ΜΑΚΗ: No. But the mistake here is to equate 'Hellenic' with 'Aristotelian'. I'll put up with restrained hellenization, provided it takes in the Ionians, the Sophists, etc. AM (14): One way to differentiate the 'new' from the 'old' is to say that 'of course, the old and the new semiotics are similar; the difference is that the neosemiotica are explicit, whereas the paleosemiotica were merely implicit.' Would such a pronouncement not be like Chomsky saying that old grammars were implicitly transformational whereas his work is explicitness itself? Lamb, around 1965-66, used to talk about 'paleo-', 'meso-', and 'neostratificationalism' in his Yale lecture handouts. ΜΑΚΗ: I don't know what is meant by the 'old' vs. the 'new' semiotics; but I distrust this formulation (as with Chomsky's 'generative' magic). AM (15): One undeniable fact is the availability of the microchip-computer. Would you agree that a quantum leap in computer technology will lead to a qualitative change (quite in keeping with classical Hegelian-Marxist thinking) and that 'neosemiotica', inasmuch as it is more objective than the old by virtue of being computer-based, will succeed in escaping the irony of reinventing the wheel? ΜΑΚΗ: I do think new technology is a critical factor and is going to bring a qualitative change in our understanding of language (as a probabilistic system; as truly 'social semiotic'—cf. Ruqaiya Hasan's work on mothers and children) and probably also of other human semiotics.

10 Adam Makkai AM (16): William Frawley of the University of Delaware writes in a recent anthology (1984), which I reviewed (Makkai 1988b), that a translated text is a semiotic act of creating a new text and that 'identity in meaning is out of the question'. How do you see translation in this context? ΜΑΚΗ: Of course, he is theoretically right: the valeur cannot be the same. (But, as someone said about synonymy: since there is no such thing, why waste a good word—let's use it for when the meaning fits pretty close!)

Some Comments on Halliday's Answers and the Questions that Prompted Them Permit me to walk backwards in this written interview. It is interesting to note (15) that Halliday does consider technological progress, especially in the computer industry, of relevance for both linguistics and semiotics. This is striking and completely in harmony with Lamb, the Stratificationalist, and in disharmony with Chomsky, who, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and actually in MIT's Electronics Research Laboratory, has made several attempts to disavow his indebtedness to 'The Computer'. As J.P. Maher (1985) convincingly proves, Chomsky's rewrite rules of the S NP + VP, NP -> Art + Ν + No., VP -» Aux + V + tense, etc. closely paralleled the input programs that were written for the old-fashioned IBM computers in use at MIT at the birth of TGG; symbolized on punched cards as patterns of square holes, this generation of computers moved material horizontally from left to right in a relatively cumbersome way. As the data-bases were relatively small, they had to be accessed by relatively complex 'syntaxes'. Chomsky even illustrated linguistic theory as a 'computer program' in front of a group of engineers (see Maher 1985: 16-19); and the proceedings of the session at Ann Arbor where Chomsky spoke were published (see Carr 1958). Yet when asked by interviewers on subsequent occasions, Chomsky vehemently denied any indebtedness to the computer.^ The history of linguistics in the turbulent twentieth century awaits a truly objective and knowledgeable historian to investigate what had been going on in the various centers of learning globally. What is significant is this: two theoreticians, Halliday and Lamb, who have made far fewer and far more modest claims about the 'human mind' than Chomsky, and who did not start their linguistic research in the Electronics Research Laboratory of either a British Polytechnic or

M.A.K. Halliday 11 an American Computer Science Department, did and do make overt use of computer data and never deny this fact. As a result the suspicion never arises that Lamb and Halliday are 'spoken to' by any computer; it is clearly evident for anyone to see that they use the machines at arm's length. Lamb is known not only as a linguist-semiotician, but as an actual computer inventor; he spent his time between Yale and Rice Universities as founder-director of Semionics Associates in Berkeley, California. West German industry has gratefully accepted Lamb's work on the computerization of simultaneous memory and recognition out of order, a natural capacity of the human brain. Halliday's work on children's language acquisition, now known as the 'Nigel Corpus', has been successfully computerized at the University of Southern California (cf. Mann 1984). Halliday's answer to question 9, the danger of semiotics becoming a bandwagon and a panacea, is interesting: he carefully distinguishes between the name 'semiotics' and the enterprise. This touches upon a point of vulnerability in semiotics: semioticians will have to decide how much nominalism to allow into their collective enterprise and how much essential work can be continued without dependence on what semiotics does best—create convenient 'signs' (that is, names and labels for things). In this regard I should have asked Halliday if he regarded lexicography as an integral part of a semiotically oriented linguistics. In this interview I did not, but I have discussed this issue with both Halliday and Lamb. Their respective positions regarding the lexicon are fascinating in their complementarity: lexis, to Halliday, is 'infinitely delicate grammar'; to Lamb, the full lexicon of a language contains or absorbs the grammar, whether in terms of 'valences' added to each entry or as 'networking information'—they amount to the same in human practice.3 That the nearly half-million entries in the Oxford English Dictionary defined by 22 million words constitute a 'taxonomy' is hard to deny. It is also hard to deny that before the computer, handling or updating such a large taxonomy was somewhat tiring, to put it mildly. It sounded far more elegant for many, therefore, to be told that 'taxonomies' are out, but 'rules' are in, and furthermore, that the 'rules' are finite in number but will 'generate' an 'infinite number of grammatically well-formed sentences and only those'. Chomsky (1980)^ unequivocally states that 'knowing a language means knowing its grammar and everything else is incidental.' Put another way, this would mean that we learn grammar before we learn words, and that in order to communicate (what else is the meaning of 'knowing a language'?) we need grammar first, and words only incidentally. Being

12 Adam Makkai an immigrant in the English-speaking world, I can testify from personal experience (an experience shared by thousands of other immigrants from all over the world) that in actual practice the very opposite happens. One tries to string word to word with precious little knowledge of the 'grammar' of the language; somehow the native speakers manage to put the right interpretation on these pre-grammatical word-strings produced in alien phonological systems (known as a heavy 'foreign accent')· It would seem, therefore, that in order 'to know a language', one has to have some sort of command over the lexicon, and that 'grammar' will come about as some sort of secretion between one lexeme and another, or that grammatical 'connectors' or 'nections' and valences will eventually grow on every lexeme as it occurs in the neighborhood of some lexemes but not next to others. It seems, then, that the specter of 'taxonomy' has suddenly transformed itself into computational savoir faire, and that this skill remains scorned and denied by Chomsky, who gained the most from early computers, whereas those who use it creatively in modern times never depended on it in the first place. What a paradox! 'Taxonomy'—the dangerous no-no word that was given out as punishment for those who dealt with field data, the assumed guilt of the 'neo-Bloomfieldians'—has suddenly been changed into a shiny compact disk (first two, now only one!) that fits in the average shirt pocket and can be taken everywhere effortlessly, although it has on it all of the OED's half-million entries with all of the 22 million words that define and illustrate the lemmas. As a practicing lexicographer myself (Makkai 1972a and b, 1975,1985,1987,1988a), I see the microchip computer, in both mainframe and P(ersonal) C(omputer) forms, as the century's major semiotic event of international and interdisciplinary significance. As Halliday observes in his answer to question 10, the term 'cybernetics' has all but disappeared, while the enterprise remains. Any computer language, whether it is the FORTRAN of the 1950s and 60s or today's BASIC, PROLOG, etc., is a semiotic structure, one that 'governs' the compiler of the machine in question via abbreviated and artificially designated symbols and fragments of words taken from English (or any major world language that has a computer industry). The closer this computer language to English, the more user-friendly it is, to use the popular term. If 'go' is an actual command that causes a program to run, the cybernetic symbol 'go' has exhibited 'user-friendliness' by graciously condescending to resemble an actual English imperative; should the same command be coded by the Greek letters Sigma Sigma Sigma Theta Theta Rho, followed by some numerals for good measure and secrecy, the cybernetic sign would lack mnemonic value, hence 'user-

M.A.K. Halliday 13 friendliness', but would, qua sign, be no better or worse than the familiar English word 'go'! In a very real sense, everyone who can operate a modem typewriter is a smallscale applied semiotician and computational linguist. This text is being written on a Canon Typest*r 7, Mark II, built in Japan. The simple fact that Typest*r is written with an * instead of an [a] is a semiotic trick coded into the product's name as its trademark. The commands MARGIN RELEASE, LEFT MARGIN, RIGHT MARGIN, TAB SET, and TAB CLR are mercifully user-friendly plain English, and in traditional accordance with the same terms on earlier, non-electronic typewriters. The buttons that say TEXT and MODE require a couple of pages of reading; indeed, the Typest*r 7 comes with a 60-page instruction and usage manual.

Halliday as Neo-Behaviorist: Semiotics

The Philosophical Dilemma of

If the job of linguistics is the scientific study of language, it makes sense to designate the job of semiotics as the scientific study of signs and signaling. But just as linguistics was torn into opposing camps of 'mentalists' and 'mechanists', or 'rule-oriented scientists' and 'taxonomical data-gatherers', semiotic inquiry faces a similar danger both in the immediate present and in the next century. Studying signs and sign systems as they are out there would be comparable to the tenets and procedures of the descriptivist-structuralist in linguistics who records observations but does not attribute to any one study special inside information on what goes on inside the informants' heads; trying to find underlying reasons and systems of motivation for humankind's sign-producing activities, on the other hand, would be comparable to 'mentalism in linguistics'—i.e., a kind of 'Quasi-Generative Semiotics' in whose pursuit the investigator would ask the question 'why?' instead of the more modest questions 'what?' and 'how?' when it comes to signs, sign systems, and the human social and psychological correlates that either co-occur with these sign systems or actually cause them to come into existence. I have no intention whatever to create a bogus problem in an area of relative peace. Semiotics has, by and large, successfully escaped the internecine warfare that TGG has thrust upon linguistics. So far, and I admit that I may be wrong, it seems that the relative peace and general atmosphere of sanity in semiotics may be ascribed to the fact that semioticians, in general, tend to be pragmatically minded observer-theo-

14 Adam Makkai reticians outfitted temperamentally with the anthropologist's curiosity wedded to a structural linguist's patience for detail and fondness for emerging patterns. A sociolinguistically based semiotics, then, is entirely in keeping with one of the major archetypes of behavioral science—that of meticulous observation and description without the hazard of delving into unproveables. Yet, from another point of view, such sociolinguistically aloof semiotics will perhaps never really reach the point where it can offer convincing answers to questions such as the following: (a) Why do people behave differently in large crowds than they do as individuals? (b) Why do military uniforms (of whatever nation or power) tend to animalize those wearing them? Why is killing, looting, and raping somehow more 'acceptable' in uniform than out of uniform? (c) Why and how do symbols of power influence mass behavior? I am thinking of Hitler's Swastika, Stalin's Red Star, the Inquisition's and the Crusaders' Cross, the Star of David (in yellow) forced onto 'Jews' by the Nazis, the 'Nuclear Disarmament' sign of the 1960s known as the 'broken cross' and identified with Satanism. (d) What kinds of information does a drama director need to make a written play come alive in the gestures, grimaces, etc. of his cast? (e) What kind of information does an opera director need to make classical opera effective both as tragedy and as comedy, or as mythology (Mozart, Verdi, Wagner)? (f) What makes a joke funny in a given setting and an unwelcome embarrassment in another? (g) Do masses rebel when they are the most oppressed, or just when they are about to breathe more freely in terms of freedom of speech, economic power, and political influence? To say that points (a) through (g) have no relevance for semiotics would be somewhat like saying that inquiry into the semantic relatedness of active and passive sentences is not in the proper domain of the linguist. The linguist should observe when and how sentences are used; then describe when and how passive ones occur; and mention in a footnote only that, by the way, both the active and the passive versions of the 'same proposition' are actually about the same set of pragmatic circumstances. I doubt that I need to argue too extensively in favor of the systemicist position which, mutatis mutandis, would inquire into the 'causes' or 'reasons' why a sign system does what it does and not just 'how'. The odium

M.A.K. Halliday 15 of 'teleological thinking' has, I will henceforth assume, been removed from scientific inquiry once and for all. The contradiction in Halliday's thinking, I think, is this: In his linguistic work he manages to overcome the 'langue-parole' controversy as well as the 'competence-performance' trap by defining the teleological outer perimeter of language as social interaction, which is a semiotic. But when we push a bit further and ask why the social interaction is the way it is, we get quasi-circular answers inasmuch as we are told that since Group A acts this-and-that way and Group Β acts another way, we have adequately disposed of the reason why they engage in social interaction in the first place. Halliday's clearest example of this is the otherwise thoroughly captivating theory of 'anti-languages', which stand to language as 'anti-societies' stand to society at large. Social alienation leads to socially antagonistic groups that engage in separatist activities, whether in order to overthrow the prevailing order or to force a standoff and a status quo therein. In short, anti-languages are spoken by revolutionaries, who may be deemed 'progressive' by later history, as with the French Revolution, or regressive and negative, like the underworld argot of Bombay, India or of any criminal group the world over. The post-Marxist Bernsteinian view of the interrelatedness of language and the social order has given Halliday a large number of fertile and exciting areas to explore, yet the same Weltanschauung has also put blinders on the general outlook of this otherwise matchless front runner. Psychology need not scare the sociolinguist; if properly understood and cultivated, it can and ought to become the sociolinguist's best and most enduring ally.

Social Interaction-Psychology (SIP): Contribution

A Neglected Hungarian

Social Interaction-Psychology (SIP) was born in the wrong country at the wrong time, and received no exposure in the major Western languages. Its inventor, the late Sändor Karacsony, was a pedagogue and philosopher. His Magyar nyelvtan tdrsaslelektani alapon (1938) was widely read and discussed in Hungary (Szipe 1984), but reached Western audiences only in scattered fragments, decades after the author's death (see Fabricius Koväcs 1975). SIP does not concentrate on cognitive knowledge in the individual heads of speaker and hearer, whose uncertainties Halliday wishes to avoid; rather, it studies

16 Adam Makkai how the 'speaker's meaning' is perceived by the 'hearer's meaning' and vice versa as speaker and hearer change roles during the course of a lingual transaction.

The Compatibility of Halliday's Semiotic Sociolinguistics with SIP ά la Karäcsony and Fabricius Koväcs Halliday's basic tripartite division of language into an ideational, an interpersonal, and a textual component implies at least some of the following: (a) Human beings have ideas, 'concepts', 'notions', 'meanings' in memory (short or long-term) which they need to transmit. (b) The transmission occurs via signs—vocal, written, or gestural; hence the system is essentially and necessarily a semiotic one, resting on an inherited contract social, whose conventions are largely unconscious to the users of the system. (c) The transmission is intrinsically social in nature: even in soliloquies, meditation, prayer, and silent prose or poetry composition an 'imagined significant other' (God, one's lover, the enemy, friends, etc.) are virtually present (d) Each socio-linguo-semiotic episode of sending and receiving constitutes a transaction in which one or the other of the protagonists achieves a purpose. (I hereby officially go on record in stating that all of evolution is teleological; 'purposes', naturally, do vary from trivial ones—meaningless 'hellos' in phatic communication—to cries for help, university lectures, courtroom trials, love letters, etc.) (e) Each socio-linguo-semiotic transaction releases psychological energy which manifests in transactions as positive or negative strokes (praise, blame, encouragement, reprimand, request, offer, acceptance, denial, etc.). (f) The episodic occurrences of socio-linguo-semiotic strokes produced via transactions draw the contours of a set of relationships. (g) Relationships are the fiber offamilies, friends hips, liaisons, marriages, rural and urban communities, counties, townships, countries, states, and governmental federations. Thus an angry diplomatic exchange between Libya and the United States is, mutatis mutandis, the same kind of negative stroke as the reprimand of a jealous husband to a wife or vice versa, or the shouting match between opposing football coaches when the validity of a goal is in question by wavering umpires.

M.A.K. Halliday 17 Halliday is on the verge of having succeeded in putting it all together. He can see the buildup of the punchline in Thurber's captivating story of the birds and the rhinoceroses ridiculing the 'love' of the other species with the memorable moral 'Laugh and the world laughs with you; love, and you love alone'. The analysis is brilliant and 99 percent convincing to this reader: Halliday offers no insight on why laughing is a public socio-linguo-semiotic, collective transaction while love, on the other hand, remains private. Thurber doesn't spell it out either, but the reader can 'read between the lines' and come to the conclusion that episodes of ridiculing others are, mutatis mutandis, as public as eating together, whereas loving and love-making, again mutatis mutandis, must remain as private as elimination. (In no known human society do people eat in solitude but defecate in public.) There is, then, a universal principle of SIP at work here: i.e., the tacit knowledge of Thurber and his readers of what is 'public' and what is 'private'. The novelty of the story of the rhinos and the birds is precisely Thurber's deceptively simple narrative style hidden in an animal story. The 'us' against 'them' principle cooccurs with the opinions and emotions expressed, and once again reinforces the view that human (or allegorically disguised as animal) communities co-inherit their 'social class' with the 'emotional attitudes' that pertain to such classes. Nor is it alien to the mainstream of Western world literature, from Stendhal, Balzac, and Zola to Dickens, Thackeray, Hemingway, and Steinbeck, to depict human conflict and occasional human reconciliation as a multi-stranded and nonunravellable Ariadne's thread which, if it is to lead us out of the labyrinth, must remain the tantalizingly complex co-product of sounds-and-letters, morphemes, words, groups/phrases, clauses, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, parts, volumes, carrying vastly complex socio-historical, anthropological, cultural, and narrative information fueled by plot, intrigue, protagonists ('good guys'), antagonists ('bad guys'), and their respective purposes, angles, and interests; all of this must flow in a certain direction, carving a riverbed in the reader's memory and emotions as the author's philosophy, message, and ultimately, of course, his/her style. Reading Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment has influenced my outlook on the world; so did Dante's Inferno and Albeit Camus's L'etranger. Remembering the 'plots' of these books and whatever 'semiotic' thread leads through them is part of the Gesamteindruck these books have left on my mind; more important, I believe, is the aesthetic-emotional effect they created. Stendhal's Le rouge et le noir made me, and many other nineteen-year-olds I knew, belligerent and assertive; The Brothers Karamazov left one with religious awe and a

18 Adam Makkai profound dislike for Ivan, the sadistic materialist who tries to shake Alyosha's faith. In the chapter of The Grand Inquisitor in which Jesus gets crucified all over again, Ivan outlines to Alyosha a past-based future prophecy not really expected ever to come true, but to be continuously present in the human 'soul/mind/ consciousness/awareness-of-identity' doing internecine battle between a multiprojected and multi-focused tableau fantastique of 'good' and 'evil'. I do not wish to be misunderstood as saying that Halliday's sociolinguistic/semiotic approach to literature does not lead to a moral evaluation of what is Evil and what is Good; I certainly cannot fault a linguist-semiotician for not being a theologian. What I do miss, however, is that this approach to textual analysis fails to reveal the underlying causes of the catharsis which, ever since Aristotle, is known to be the prime goal of tragedy, comedy (in the Ancient Greek sense), and all of its modern derivatives. Literature without catharsis, a more-than-just-the-plot denouement that leaves the reader in an altered state of emotion-colored consciousness, is no significant literature at all. The common television crime drama and prime-time soap opera, now captivating millions who no longer read the classics, is succeeding precisely because although it has no high-flown language, plot, and style, it does cater to this elementary human instinct of 'punishing the bad guys' and 'rewarding the good guys'. This is so discouragingly primitive in its Dallas, Falcon Crest, Mission Impossible, The Colbys, Santa Barbara, Cagney andLacey, etc. manifestations that the times may not be too far off when students of comparative literature will be forced to compare the character of J.R. Ewing to that of Angela Channing (portrayed by Larry Hagman in Dallas and Jane Wyman in Falcon Crest, respectively). The irony of the matter is that in Balzac's entire series of the classic Comedie humaine we do not find thoroughly incompatible contrasts versus this aforementioned American television soap dyad, and so to draw parallels between an Eugöne de Rastignac (Balzac) and a J.R. Ewing (Dallas) is, unfortunately for serious literary scholars, not entirely out of the question qua socio-linguo-semiotic textual analysis. Halliday and the Diachronic Dimension There was nothing drearier at Yale in the 1960s than being forced to become an Indo-Europeanist whether or not one was so inclined. Under the triple pressure of Bloch, Tedesco, and Cowgill, the study of linguistics basically amounted to Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Old Church Slavic, and Gothic with practically no syntax; Seman-

M.A.K. Halliday 19 tics was available only once every two years when Wells was teaching it; phonology and morphology, of course, came packaged in with the Indo-European. One yearned for a synchronic analysis of a text, a transcribed tape, anything. Now that we do at long last have, in Halliday's brilliantly and broadly conceived and well-orchestrated socio-linguo-semiotic approach, such a synchronic system, one involuntarily wonders why Halliday has so little to say about the pasts of languages and language families. Is there no relevance to English past tense formation with or without 'dental preterites' as opposed to 'umlaut strong verbs'? Is English and German word order not somehow historically traceable to a ProtoGermanic state where, after the loss of inflectional endings, a tendency toward 'isolation' set in? Is the Ideational Component not largely and essentially the same as the cumulative word stock of the English language, well represented in the (roughly) half-million entries in the Oxford English Dictionary and the 22 million words defining and exemplifying them? Is this tremendous Wortschatz not a historical product, the work of many centuries that settled down layer after layer on English, forming a huge palimpsest? Are the entry-pairs, qua signs, not somewhat tell-tale, indicating that the Norman Conquest, an event of 'external history of English', did end up being a synchronic fact that tells specialist apart from laymen? Consider: moon: lunar sun : solar star : stellar milk : lactose dog : canine cat: feline pig : porcine cow : bovine horse: equine seal: phocine governor : gubernatorial earth : terrestrial/tellurian pusillanimous sesquipedalian : cowardly windbag meretriciously perspicuous : whorishly see-through irrational intransigence : dumb stubbornness The old teacher walked around the building : The superannuated educator circumambulated the edifice Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are : Scintillate, scintillate, diminutive asteroid, how intense my inquiry regarding your identity The examples can be continued ad nauseam and may irritate the practicing lexicographer as trivial; the anglophone public at large, alas, seems to be in urgent

20 Adam Makkai need of remedial instruction in vocabulary development on a trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific basis, regardless of social background. The major drift in English nowadays is away from Latinate words such as 'obsequious', 'acquiescence', 'eventuate', and 'transpire'; instead we tend to use 'chicken', 'give in', '(what) goes on', and '(the robbery) is going down'. If this division of Latinate vocabulary and Anglo-Saxon English were neatly correlatable with sex, age, exact provenance, and education, the sociolinguistic stream in linguistics and semiotics would be able to make a clear-cut case for [+foreign = educated] whereas t+domestic = uneducated]. Alas, the picture is far more garbled and indecipherable because of the intrinsically palimpsestic nature of the English language. That English is a palimpsest was first stated ex cathedra by Simeon Potter and picked up by J.P. Maher (1969). The word palimpsest derives from the Greek palin 'again' and psao Ί scrape'. Palimpsests were paintings of angels, the Madonna, etc. that covered up, for instance, Leda and the Swan by Leonardo da Vinci because the latter was considered immorally lewd by the medieval censors. Instead of destroying the pictures, the monks painted over them. The Battle of Hastings (1066) and subsequent graftings of Latin, Greek, etc. onto the Anglo-Saxon body of English resulted in a unique linguistic phenomenon—a new language which, starting with Chaucer and culminating in Shakespeare, but still evolving at perhaps the rapidest rate on the planet, amounts to one of the world's most fascinating semiotic puzzles. Just as Umberto Eco illustrated his brand of semiotics in the novel The Name of the Rose, Halliday ought to try writing a number of short stories or novels of moderate size in which the teacher of geography is forced to say Earth-lore, because Greek is forbidden; the word sociolinguistics must be translated into AS-English as folk-talk-lore, and the medical term epidemiology as spreading folk-illness. The point I am trying to make is that the different 'semantic styles' systemicists find in modern English prose have historical foundations, and that these historical foundations are either taken entirely for granted or deliberately ignored. Yet the very Halliday who has given us the best description of the development of how a child is Learning How to Mean (1975) must certainly have noticed that the phase of 'breaking into the mother tongue' carries with it the flotsam and jetsam of 1066, where fibbing and lying don the more elaborate phonetic cloaks of prevarication and ratiocination, to mention just two examples. With fibbing and lying one manipulates one's environment on a more sincere level than when one learns how to ratiocinate and/or

M.A.K. Halliday 21 prevaricate. Different words are different semiotic events and as such, 'synonymy* notwithstanding, they will surely deliver 'different strokes for different folks'.

Attainments and Frustrations in a 'Social Semiotic* Framework Doubtless the key chapter in Language as Social Semiotic is the middle chapter with the same title (Halliday 1978: 108-126). In it the reader will find the condensed essence of Halliday's theory of Language as Social Semiotic. Bernstein, Malinowski, Firth, Cicourel, Berger, and Luckman are the sources (all documented in Halliday 1978, thus only mentioned here) of what situation, register, code, the linguistic system, and social structure mean to Halliday. The following sums it up best: What are these functional components of the semantic system? They are the modes of meaning that are present in every use of language in every social context. A text is a product of all three; it is a polyphonic composition in which different semantic melodies are interwoven, to be realized as integrated lexicogrammatical structures. Each functional component contributes to a band of structure to the whole. (1978:112, emphasis added) Halliday proceeds with a description of the ideational, the interpersonal, and the textual components: The ideational function represents the speaker's meaning potential as an observer...language is 'about something'.... This is the component through which the language encodes the cultural experience and the speaker.. .his own individual experience.... It expresses the phenomena of the environment, things, creatures, objects, actions.. .facts and reports. The interpersonal component represents the speaker's meaning potential as an intruder. It is the participatory function of language...questioner-respondent... informer-doubter and the like; these constitute the interpersonal meaning of language. The textual component represents the speaker's text-forming potential; it is what makes language relevant.... Texture... situation... situational environment.... In the clause, for example, the ideational function is represented by

22 Adam Makkai transitivity, the interpersonal by mood and modality, and the textual by a set of systems that have been collectively referred to as 'theme'...the functional organization of meaning in language is built into the core of the linguistic system, as the most general organizing principle of the lexicogrammatical stratum. (1978: 112-13) In the section Ά sociolinguistic view of semantics' (1978: 114-15), Halliday introduces the notion of 'the semantics of situation types'. Since one deals with a 'set of context-specific semantic descriptions' rather than with the semantic description of the whole language, a 'semantic description is the description of a register'; furthermore, everything is always context-sensitive. The structure of the situation subdivides into field, tenor, and mode (1978: 115). Drawing on his rich and well-known 'Nigel Corpus', Halliday exemplifies these as (a) child at play, moving wheeled vehicles, (b) small child and parent interacting, and (c) spoken, alternately monologue and dialogue. This is presented in four complex diagrams (1978: 117-20) which one must study for about an hour each; the effort is well worth it. Halliday reassuringly lifts the burden off the reader's shoulders when he writes: In our folk linguistic terminology, the 'meaning' is represented as 'wording'—which in turn is expressed as 'sound' ('pronouncing') or as 'spelling'. The folk linguistic, incidentally, shows our awareness of the tristratal nature of language. (1978:122) Through the intermediate building blocks of 'Text and situation', 'Situation as semiotic structure', 'Situation and semantic system', 'Situation, semantic system and register', and 'Register and code' (1978: 122-23) we arrive at Halliday's central message as semiotic semanticist and linguist-sociologist: The foregoing synthesis presupposes an interpretation of the social system as a social semiotic: a system of meanings that constitutes the 'reality' of the culture. This is the higher-level system to which language is related: the semantic system of language is a realization of the social semiotic. There are many other forms of its symbolic realization besides language; but language is unique in having its own semantic stratum.

M.A.K. Halliday 23 This takes us back to the 'meaning potential' of 4.1. The meaning potential of language, which is realized in the lexicogrammatical system, itself realizes meanings of a higher order; not only the semiotic of the particular social context, its organization as field, tenor and mode, but also that of the total set of social contexts that constitute the social system. In this respect language is unique among the modes of expression of social meanings: it operates on both levels, having meaning both in general and in particular at the same time. This property arises out of the functional organization or the semantic system, whereby the meaning potential associated with a particular social context is derived from corresponding sets of generalized options in the semantic system. (1978: 123-24) The title of this section is 'Attainments and frustrations in a "social semiotic" network', and so far all I have done is quote Halliday. It could be argued that I should have started by giving a brief twenty-page synopsis of the entire book and then started exemplifying the quotes. But that would have been cheating the readers of The Semiotic Web, as my task here was not to popularize Halliday and his well-known ideas, but to try to evaluate them as a contribution to general semiotics. The main witness in this 'hearing', if I may be permitted to so characterize this chapter, is Halliday himself, who, as shown in his answer to one of my questions, draws a diagram (see Figure 1) of his view of semiotics and marks off his own work area therein. In a sense this chapter could have ended right there: here is Halliday's place in semantics, linguistics, and semiotics. But that, again, would have been cheating the readership, as Halliday is not the sort of thinker you write a book report on without giving some testimony that he urged you on to do your own thinking. I am, therefore, permitting myself to say that the attainments are truly impressive and major. Halliday has, for the first time in the history of linguistics, succeeded in presenting a coherent philosophy of human reality, replete with how we tell a story, play as children, play with children as adults; how we manage to reflect our place(s) and role(s) in society with the very words and sentence structures we produce. This is admirably compact despite its enormous complexity. And now my question: why is Halliday's Systemic-Functional Grammar, his semiotic sociolinguistics, not the ruling paradigm in linguistics today? Why does the esteemed editor of Language, Sarah G. Thomason, advise her readers in a recent editorial that 'Binding and Government' ά la Chomsky is what

24 Adam Makkai most linguists want to hear about? Doesn't Halliday have a more convincing answer for every aspect of human language? To my mind he certainly does, and in those parts of the Commonwealth and the United States where he has followers who have understood him, 'Binding and Government' shrinks into the obscurity it deserves in the shadow of Halliday's theory. The problem lies in the fact that this outstanding sociolinguist who knows that 'social reality' is created by our own activities (following Berger and Luckman's classic book, The Social Construction of Reality [1966]), Halliday has somehow failed in turning his philosophy into a social force. Chomsky, on the other hand, although totally disinterested in sociolinguistics as well as pedagogy, has succeeded. His movement lives on, after having died several deaths: first as the Syntactic Structures model of 1957, then as the Aspects of the Theory of Syntax model of 1965, then as the so-called 'Extended Standard Theory'. The currently popular 'Binding and Government' is a rewording of some very old and well-known Indo-Europeanist notions and a general withdrawal from 'transformations', 'deep structures', and 'rules'. Why does this retrogressive and anti-social stance generate enthusiasm while Halliday and his truly revolutionary ideas conjure up but apologetic and slightly incredulous smiles that say 'interesting but strange'? Maybe the hallmark of a true scholar is a deliberate avoidance of charismatic behavior. Maybe Halliday writes for the future. Whatever the case, his own dislike of 'psychology', and therefore 'psychologizing', is at the root of the frustrations that remain in this otherwise magnificent ceuvre. I list them as I see them: (a) insufficient number of followers; (b) insufficient number of major disciples functioning as full professorial researchers worldwide; (c) avoidance of head-on confrontations with the opposition; (d) reluctance to come to grips with human psychopoeia, our common condition of trading in wills and purposes; (e) excessive modesty in approaching truly profound literature, both as writer and as explicator, (f) failure to incorporate diachrony into the general theory as it is best seen in the AS-Latinate lexical split in English and the sociosemantic consequences thereof; and (g) overemphasis of English. Halliday is not only fluent in Mandarin, but is also a scholar of it; his knowledge of Russian, Italian, French, etc. would certainly

M.A.K. Halliday 25 enable him to venture outside of British English. (Many of his observations are more relevant for British English than for American English.)

Where Do We Go from Here? Halliday's early retirement from teaching at age 62 will, we all hope, have given him enough time and energy to bring this colossal edifice to internal completion and, beyond that, external fruition as well. He will have to concede that Social Interaction-Psychology (SIP) is a must; he will have to admit that the lexicon is a historical product whose internal layers, arranged along genetic and chronological lines, positively correlate with the synchronic layout of modern users' sociolinguistic status, which in tum is relative to their geographical provenance as U.K., U.S., Canada, Australia, or New Zealand anglophones. The forays and skirmishes into educational policy in the U.K., Kenya, here, there, and everywhere detract from the central message—i.e., that semiotic sociolinguistics has a 'social accountability'. A concentrated debunking of the 'cobwebs of the past' (to paraphrase Lenin) would still be in order, and if Halliday doesn't rise to the challenge, someone else (hopefully) will. On the positive side of the ledger we have the urgent necessity of describing and explaining why and how the three-pronged linguistic theories that have a common base in semiotics not only are compatible, but must be studied and applied together in order to restore linguistics to the rank of science rather than ideology. These triadic linguistic-semiotic theories are the following: (1) Pike's Tagmemics ('field', 'wave', and 'particle'). (2) Lamb's Cognitive-Stratificational Grammar ('Semo-Lexology', 'MorphoPhonology', 'Phono-Graphology', and other modes). (3) Shaumyan's Applicative-Generative Grammar ('Phenotype, 'Genotype', and 'Typological Transformations', which, as 'semantic acts', always alter the meaning rather than preserve it). (4) Halliday's own triad of theories ('Scale and Category Theory', 'SystemicFunctional Grammar', and 'Functional Grammar'), plus the three-fold view of language as Ideational, Interpersonal, and Textual. (5) Diachronic Linguistics, Indo-European (Bedeutungslehre 'semantics', Satz und Formenlehre 'syntax and morphology', and Lautlehre 'phonology').

26 Adam Makkai We need to find a new cover term for the emerging synthesis. Immodestly, I suggest the term Ecolinguistics, as that term clearly implies the ecological nature of language, its organicity, its interrelatedness, the fact that it evolves both in individuals and in social collectives of individuals. It implies that language is a social construct, but is fueled by individual cognizants and sentors-resentors (i.e., protagonists and antagonists in irenic or polemic lingual transactions); and it allows for attempted mathematical explicitness and cybernetic manipulation given the understanding that 'context-free' approaches to an ecology are the ultimate contradictio in adjecto. I do not consider myself a Halliday specialist. I accepted this invitation to write for The Semiotic Web what I, from my vantage point, see as the semiotic essence of Halliday's work. He sees life as a pansemiotic construct anchored in the social order whose prima facie manifestation is human language in all its manifold aspects. I have learned an enormous amount from Halliday, both through his writings and in long personal conversations, and he must forgive me if I (unwittingly) misrepresented any of his statements and views. I view this essay as the mere beginning of a future collective effort that will, I hope, lead us to Ecolinguistics in the winged chariot of Semiotics.

Notes 1. However great the temptation to tum this paper into a comparative essay on the 'tiered-theory linguists and semioticians' (Halliday, Pike, Lamb, and Shaumyan), I cannot do so in clear conscience, because I would not be doing justice to my topic at hand and to the other theoreticians involved. The topic is in urgent need of discussion, however, as identifying, equating, and differentiating these four major thinkers has become as inevitable as it is easy to do poorly. 2. Readers are invited to peruse Maher 1985, starting with p. 16 under the heading 'The computer model'. Maher quotes from the New York Times as well as other published sources showing that Chomsky, Fodor, Halle, Katz, Kiparsky, Klima, and Matthews jointly rejected any notion of being influenced by the computer, when in fact Chomsky's own paper appeared in Carr (ed.) 1958.

M.A.K. Halliday 27 3. Personal communication accompanied by mimeographed handouts. I have devoted to this subject a major, as yet unpublished paper in the form of an invited Presidential Debate. EUROLEX, the European Institute for Lexicography, met in Budapest, Hungary in September 1987. I had been asked by Noel Osselton, EUROLEX's President, teaching in Newcastle upon Tyne, to counter Dr. Robert Burchfield's motion according to which 'a dictionary should contain those facts of a language that are not contained in its grammar'. Dr. Burchfield was seconded by Alain Rey of Paris, I by Robert Ilson of London. The Burchfield motion was defeated in an open vote, 317 to 9. The debate was videotaped by the BBC for educational television in the U.K. A written version of the 'Lexis vs. Grammar' issue is forthcoming. Both Halliday and Lamb sent me copious notes, as they knew about my upcoming confrontation (a very friendly one at that) with the OED's former Update Editor, and this is my first opportunity to acknowledge their help in print. 4. A large portion of Chomsky's later book Rules and Representations appeared first in a special issue of Brain Sciences (1979-80, Steven Harnad [ed.]). It is worthwhile to compare the book to the peer-group opinions expressed in Brain Sciences. At Harnad's invitation, I too submitted a statement to Brain Sciences, but was later unable to prepare it for actual publication due to my mother's death in Budapest. The content of this unpublished 'peer opinion' will go very well with the EUROLEX debate mentioned in note 3.

References Berger, Peter L. and Luckmann, Thomas 1966 The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge. New York: Doubleday. Carr, John W. Ill (ed.) 1958 Computer Programming and Artificial Intelligence: An Intensive Course for Practicing Scientists and Engineers. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan College of Engineering. Chomsky, Noam 1957 Syntactic Structures. The Hague: Mouton. 1965 Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. 1980 Rules and Representations. New York: Columbia University Press.

28 Adam Makkai Engels, Friedrich 1960 The Family, the State and Private Property. New York: Philosophical Library. Fabricius Koväcs, Ferenc 1975 Linguistics, communication theory, and social interaction psychology. In Toward a Theory of Context in Linguistics and Literature, Proceedings of a Conference of the Kelemen Mikes Hungarian Cultural Society, Maastricht, September 21-25, 1971 (De Proprietatibus Litterarum, Series Minor, 18), Adam Makkai (ed.). The Hague: Mouton. Fawcett, Robin, Halliday, M.A.K., Lamb, Sydney M., and Makkai, Adam 1983 Semiotics of Language and Culture, vols. 1 and 2. Dover, MA and London: Frances Pinter. Frawley, William (ed.) 1984 Translation: Literary, Linguistic and Philosophical Perspectives. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Halliday, M.A.K. 1959 The Language of the Chinese 'Secret History of the Mongols' (Publications of the Philological Society 17). Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1961 Categories of the theory of grammar. Word 17, 241-92. 1967 Intonation and Grammar in British English (Series Practica 48). The Hague: Mouton. 1972 Towards a Sociological Semantics (Working Papers and Pre-publications C-14). Urbino: Centra Internazionale di Semiotica e di Linguistica, Universitä di Urbino. 1973 Explorations in the Function of Language. London: Edward Arnold. 1975a Learning How to Mean. London: Edward Arnold. 1975b Language as social semiotic: Towards a general sociolinguistic theory. In The First LACUS Forum, A. Makkai and V.B. Makkai (eds.), 1746. Columbia, SC: Hornbeam Press. 1976 Anti-languages. American Anthropologist 78 (3), 570-84. 1978 Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. London: Edward Arnold. 1984 Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold. Halliday, M.A.K, and Hasan, Ruqaiya 1976 Cohesion in English. London: Longman.

M.A.K. Halliday 29 Karäcsony, Sändor 1938 Magyar nyelvtan tärsaslelektani alapon [Hungarian Grammar Based on Social Interaction-Psychology]. Budapest: Exodus. Kolers, Paul 1969 In Psychology Today (May), 34. Kontra, Miklös (ed.) 1984 Ferenc Fabriems Koväcs: A Bibliography and Commentary. Bloomington, IN: Eurolingua. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich 1960 Collected Works of Lenin. New York: Philosophical Library. Mäher, J. Peter 1969 The paradox of creation and tradition in grammar: Sound pattern of a palimpsest. Language Sciences 7,15-24. 1985 The transformational-generative paradigm: A silver anniversary polemic. Forum Linguisticum 5 (1), 1-35. Makkai, Adam 1972a Idiom Structure in English (Janua Linguarum, Series Maior, 48). The Hague: Mouton. 1972b A Dictionary of Space English (English Language Institute of America). Chicago: Consolidated Book Publishers. 1975 Madison Avenue advertising: A scenario. In The First LACUS Forum, A. Makkai and V.B. Makkai (eds.), 197-208. Columbia, SC: Hornbeam Press. 1985 Amerikai angol idiomatikus szoläsok es kifejezesek tdra. Budapest: International House. 1987 Handbook of Commonly Used American Idioms. Woodbury, NY: Barron's Educational Series. 1988a A Dictionary of American Idioms, second revised edition. Hauppage, NY: Barron's Educational Series. 1988b Review article of Frawley 1984. Language 64 (1), 180-87. Makkai, Adam (ed.) 1975 Toward a Theory of Context in Linguistics and Literature, Proceedings of a Conference of the Kelemen Mikes Hungarian Cultural Society, Maastricht, September 21-25, 1971 (De Proprietatibus Litterarum, Series Minor, 18). The Hague: Mouton.

30 Adam Makkai Makkai, Adam, Gates, J. Edward, and Boatner, Maxine Tull (eds.) 1975 A Dictionary of American Idioms. Woodbury, NY: Barron's Educational Series. Mann, William C. 1984 A linguistic ovwerview of the Nigel text-generation grammar. In The Tenth LACUS Forum, Alan Manning, Pierre Martin, and Kim McCalla (eds.), 255-65. Columbia, SC: Hornbeam Press. Potter, Simeon 1951 A Course in Linguistics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Shaumyan, Sebastian 1987 Λ Semiotic Theory of Language (Advances in Semiotics). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Szipe, György 1984 Ferenc Fabricius Koväcs and Hungarian mother tongue-education. In Ferenc Fabricius Koväcs: A Bibliography and Commentary, Miklös Kontra (ed.). Bloomington, IN: Eurolingua.

Adam Makkai (b. 1935) is Professor of Linguistics at the University of IllinoisChicago and founding Executive Director of the Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States (LACUS, Inc.). He was Fulbright-Hayes senior research Professor in Singapore (1985-86), and is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Hong Kong Baptist College in Hong Kong. His principal research interests include idiomaticity, lexicography, syntax and semantics, stratificational theory, Hungarian studies, and poetic language. He is a practicing bilingual Hungarian-English poet and translator as well. Among his publications are Idiom Structure in English (1972), Readings in Stratificational Linguistics (edited with David G. Lockwood, 1972), and Theoretical and practical aspects of an associative lexicon for 20th century English' (1980). Address: Department of Linguistics, University of Illinois-Chicago, P.O. Box 4348, Chicago, IL 60680.

Alexander Bryan Johnson (1786-1867): Linguistic Philosopher

The First

K.T. Fann

Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language. (Wittgenstein 1922) Much of what is esteemed as profound philosophy is nothing but disputatious criticism on the meaning of words. We are mystifying our knowledge by means of a misunderstanding of the nature of language. (Johnson 1828) Who is A.B. Johnson? 1 It is a scandal that this question should still be posed. But the fact is that most philosophers have never heard of him. Briefly put, A.B. Johnson was a self-taught philosophic genius who, completely alone, set out in the 1820s to analyze the nature and limits of language. He was the first thinker who consciously and systematically based his whole approach to the problems of philosophy on a critique of language. In fact, he anticipated, in incredible detail and by more than a century, most of the insights associated with the contemporary school of linguistic philosophy. A.B. Johnson was born in Gosport, England, of Dutch-Jewish ancestry. He immigrated to the United States in 1801 with only a grammar school education behind him, and settled in Utica, New York, where his father had arrived several years earlier. He worked in his father's successful trading post business while spending his spare time reading any books on 'philosophy, grammar and etymology* he could find in the local library. After his father's retirement, Johnson assumed management of the family fortune and embarked on a long and successful

32 K.T. Fann career in business and finance. At age thirty-three, he began the study of law and was admitted to the bar, but he never practiced it; instead he began his long career as a banker, first as a director and soon as president of the Ontario Branch Bank of Utica. For the next forty-eight years, until his death at eighty-one years of age, his external life was that of a successful banker, thrice-married father of fourteen children, and respected public figure both locally and nationally. Throughout all this his inner life was devoted to philosophy, as the inscription on his tombstone states clearly: The author of many books A lawyer by education A banker during active life A student of philosophy always.

His Writings on Language and Philosophy During his long and active life, Johnson wrote many magazine articles and pamphlets on every conceivable subject. He published books on economics (An Inquiry into the Nature of Value and of Capital, 1813), on politics (A Guide to the Right Understanding of Our American Union, 1857), and on religion and morality (Religion in Its Relation to the Present Life, 1841, and An Encyclopedia of Instruction, 1857). He spent many years in a valiant effort to compile A Collated Dictionary: or A Complete Index to the English Language, an effort thwarted by the publication in 1852 of Roget's Thesaurus, which was a 'remarkable approximation' to Johnson's planned dictionary. What engrossed him most, however, was his thinking and writing about language and philosophy—in particular the theory of meaning and the theory of knowledge. He published three books on language: The Philosophy of Human Knowledge, or A Treatise on Language (1828); A Treatise on Language: or the Relation which Words Bear to Things (1836); and The Meaning of Words: Analysed into Words and Unverbal Things, and Unverbal Things Classified into Intellections, Sensations and Emotions (1854). He also published two books on the theory of knowledge: The Physiology of the Senses, or How and What We See, Hear, Taste, Feel and Smell (1856) and Deep Sea Soundings and Explorations of the Bottom: or The Ultimate Analysis of Human Knowledge (1861).

Alexander Bryan Johnson 33 A few months before his death, Johnson briefly summarized, at the end of his long (and never published) autobiography, what he thought his philosophy had accomplished: All speculative philosophies precedent of mine are like tunes, which skillful musicians play on a piano forte. Each philosopher plays with words such a tune as he deems best; but my philosophy plays no tune, but refers every tuneful note to the internal machinery of the piano from which the tuneful note proceeds. I am the first philosopher that has thus gone deeper than language, and has sought to discover the meaning of words in man's internal organism, a meaning that is not words. The verbal systems of speculative philosophy are as interminable as the different tunes that can be formed out of the notes of a piano, and realizing how barren such philosophies have ever been for the settlement of the questions for which such philosophers are employed, I have essayed the new system as an ultimate and fixed limit of all speculative knowledge, and which will in time, I fondly trust, cause an abandonment of the old and endless speculations of the verbal philosopher. In his lifetime Johnson's philosophical writings attracted very little attention. Being immersed in business, he had no connections with the academic world, and was totally out of touch with the mainstream of thought of his day. He published most of his books at his own expense and, as he says in his autobiography, The only use I made of the book was to distribute some copies to my friends, but I never made any effort to give any book of mine a notoriety with the public, and to this probably may be owing the little notoriety any of them ever acquired. I thought if they merit public notice, they would eventually obtain it, and I left them to float or sink by their own buoyancy. Alas, they all sank silently into oblivion without making a ripple. In a scrapbook in which Johnson kept clippings of reviews and criticisms of his books we find only one long (and by and large favorable) review of his first book on language, by Timothy Flint in The Western Review (Cincinnati, 1829). All other clippings are short 'notes of new books' appearing in local newspapers. For the next hundred years, Alexander Bryan Johnson's works remained in total limbo.

34 K.T. Fann The Rediscovery and the Re-Disappearance of A.B. Johnson The 'linguistic turn' in Western philosophy initiated by Wittgenstein earlier in this century was indirectly responsible for Johnson's rediscovery. In 1938 Stillman Drake, who was acquainted with the philosophy of Wittgenstein through a student of Wittgenstein (Daniel Bellmont), came across a copy of Johnson's Treatise on Language in a San Francisco bookstore and was immediately struck by the similarity in style and intention between the two philosophers.2 Drake published an article in a new journal—Etc. A Review of General Semantics (Summer, 1944)—entitled 'A.B. Johnson and his works on language', thus introducing Johnson's philosophy to modern readers for the first time. Drake also produced fortytwo copies of the Treatise on his own hand press and distributed them to his friends. Among them was David Rynin of Berkeley, who prepared for the University of California Press a conflated edition of Johnson's The Philosophy of Human Knowledge of 1828 and its revision of 1836, A Treatise on Language, together with an informative introduction and a book-length 'Critical essay on Johnson's philosophy of language'. 3 This was published in 1947, and a paperback edition appeared in 1959. At about the same time that Drake rediscovered Johnson, Irving T. Lee rediscovered Johnson independently and made numerous references to Johnson's language theories in his 1941 book, Language Habits in Human Affairs. Lee contributed further to modern Johnson scholarship by re-printing Johnson's Meaning of Words in an edition of five hundred copies. These two modem reprints by Rynin and Lee, plus a few other references, constituted the whole extent of interest in Johnson for the next twenty years. Writing in 1967, Rynin said, Twenty years ago, after publishing my Alexander Bryan Johnson's Ά Treatise on Language'...I sat back with confidence, expecting that the discovery of this important unknown thinker...would shortly come to the attention of and affect at least the linguistically oriented philosophers.... Although several thousand copies of the work...were sold, a number of favorable reviews appeared, and occasionally quotations or references found their way into the literature, the net effect was about nil. Nine out of ten, or even a higher proportion, of philosophers have still never heard of Johnson, almost nothing has been written about him, and to my knowledge his name does not yet appear in any history of philosophy.

Alexander Bryan Johnson 35 In 1965 I accidentally came across a copy of Rynin's 1947 edition of Johnson's Treatise while writing my dissertation (Fann 1969) and editing an anthology (Fann 1967) on Wittgenstein. I was amazed by the degree to which Johnson anticipated many of Wittgenstein's insights. I got in touch with David Rynin and a few others who knew about Johnson and obtained from them, in one form or another, all of his philosophical and most of his other writings. There seemed to be a small revival of interest in Johnson. As a consequence, a centennial conference on the life and works of A.B. Johnson was organized by Professor Charles L. Todd and held in Johnson's home town, Utica, New York in 1967 (the Proceedings of which were published as Todd and Blackwood 1969). Meanwhile, Rynin's essay on Johnson appeared in the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and his 1947 edition of Johnson's Treatise was republished with a new preface by Dover Publications in 1968. It seemed to me, as it seemed to Stillman Drake at that time, that 'A.B. Johnson is at last safely back from obscurity, to which he will never again be relegated*. How wrong we were! When I was invited by Professor Sebeok to write 'a report on Alexander Bryan Johnson' for The Semiotic Web and learned that he knew of my interest in Johnson from my few published remarks in Language and Value, I assumed that he wanted me to report on Johnson scholarship since the Centennial Conference. As I have been totally out of touch with philosophical literature during the last two decades, I also assumed that there must be a body of literature on Johnson to be reported on. Consequently, I employed a graduate assistant to do a thorough search, including computer checks, of any and all writings and references about A.B. Johnson since 1967. To my amazement, my assistant found practically nothing—no books, dissertations or articles on A.B. Johnson, and even the Dover edition of the Treatise is out of print. My assistant could locate only brief (one paragraph each) references to Johnson in two articles (one of which refers to him as 'Professor' Alexander Bryon Johnson!), and a longer discussion of Johnson (one section out of five) in another article.^ The situation is worse than twenty years ago. Since there is nothing to report on, and since there is no sense in writing an analysis or critique of an unknown philosopher, I am left with the task of attempting to resuscitate Johnson. It is impossible in an article to attempt an adequate sketch of Johnson's original views, or to do justice to the richness of illustration and the perceptiveness with which he deals with philosophical problems. Nevertheless, I hope to present enough of his ideas in his own words (especially since none of his writings are in

36 K.T. Fann print) to convince the reader that this much-neglected thinker deserves to be heard from again.

Johnson's Conception of Philosophy It is a peculiarity of philosophical activity that the investigation of the nature, tasks, and methods of philosophy constitutes a most important part of the whole enterprise. Every 'revolution' in philosophy involves essentially a radical change in the conception of philosophy itself. If philosophy before A.B. Johnson is characterized as different attempts at answering various philosophical questions, then Johnson's philosophy may be characterized as a systematic questioning of the questions themselves. As he puts it, 'Questions have interrogated everything but themselves' (TL p. 241).5 This is related to his point in a previous quote: 'all speculative philosophies precedent of mine are like tunes.... Each philosopher plays with words such a tune as he deems best; but my philosophy plays no tune...'. Elsewhere he says, 'Every philosopher gives us a new phrase, and like a quack with a new nostrum, desires us to be content with no other' (MW p. 163).5 Philosophers precedent of Johnson whose names occur most frequently in his writings are the British Empiricists Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and their opponents, Thomas Reid and Dugald Stewart, the Scottish Common Senses Philosophers. Although Johnson inherited a radical empiricist epistemology from them, he expressed no indebtedness to them. In fact he quotes them only to illustrate the kind of mistakes they are guilty of when they fail to understand the nature of language. Johnson considered his woik to be that new logic and critic which Locke began to suspect at the close of his Essay on Human Understanding, where he said (in Bk. IV, Chap. 4, § 4) 'perhaps if ideas and words were distinctly weighed and duly considered, they would afford us another sort of logic and critic than what we have hitherto been acquainted with'. What a painful, but too late a dawning of light, must this have been! (MW p. 255) According to Johnson, this 'new logic and critic', or what he sometimes refers to as the Philosophy of Human Knowledge, 'has been to metaphysics what alchymy has to chymistry; or what perpetual motion has been to mechanics' (TL

Alexander Bryan Johnson 37 p. 34). This 'new system' does not provide a new nostrum or answers to old philosophical questions; as he says, 'My philosophy plays no tune'. This point is made clearer in this passage: I shall not, however, attempt to establish the unverbal meaning of any particular word, but simply attempt to discriminate words from unverbal things.... The meaning of particular words, as matter, spirit, body and mind, etc., is constantly engaging the efforts of philosophers, who suppose they are engaged in profounder discussions than merely defining the signification of particular words;—but I disclaim the discussion. ..because the disclaimer will aid in showing, by contrast, the character of my design. (MW p. 18) His design aims to show that most of the propositions and questions of philosophers are neither true nor false, but 'insignificant'. They arise from our 'misunderstanding of the nature of language' (MW p. 234). Philosophers are 'misled by language', or 'deceived by the forms of language'; they 'play bo-peep with words', and their 'misuse of language' causes intellectual 'perplexity', 'amazement', and 'mystery'. (He used these terms repeatedly throughout his writings.) Thus Johnson's verdict on previous philosophy is 'much of what is esteemed as profound philosophy is nothing but a disputatious criticism on the meaning of words' (TL p. 282), and 'Nearly all the perplexing questions of speculation are produced by verbal equivokes.... Such equivokes pass usually for profound mysteries; but all mystery vanishes' when we understand the nature of language correctly (MW p. 231-32). Our misapprehension of the nature of language has occasioned a greater waste of time, and effort, and genius, than all the other mistakes and delusions with which humanity has been afflicted. It has retarded immeasurably our physical knowledge of every kind, and vitiated what it could not retard. The misapprehension exists still in unmitigated virulence; and though metaphysicks, a rank branch of the errour, is fallen into disrepute, it is abandoned like a mine which will not repay the expense of working, rather than like a process of mining which we have discovered to be constitutionally incapable of producing gold. (TL p. 300)

38 K.T. Fann Once we have acquired a correct understanding of the nature of language, this knowledge 'will guide you safely through the most subtle labyrinths of metaphysics, and enable you to separate the tinsel of indolent conjecture from the gold of laborious observation' (TL p. 111). 'Persons who know not the latest sophistries of language, know no verbal knowledge unfallaciously, and in proportion as their defect is unsuspected, the world, considered speculatively, will be full of mysteries' (MW p. 11). The goal of this new philosophy is, therefore, to make philosophical problems 'vanish' or to 'terminate the mystification' (MW p. 251), so that we shall possess our knowledge devoid of all fallacy; and shall no longer deem perplexingly mysterious, that we cannot discover sensibly what we can conceive intellectually, or commit any kindred solecism; and we shall pass through life exempt from all mystery except the one great common mystery that attaches equally and alike to all we know, or can know—an ennobling consummation abundantly remunerative of all the intellectual labour it may cost the man who shall attain it. (MW p. 255)

Similarity to Wittgenstein's

Conception

Anyone who is familiar with Wittgenstein cannot help but see, from the above brief description, how closely Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy resembles Johnson's in all essential points. Even more, some of the specific insights, examples, and language used are amazingly similar. Wittgenstein also claimed, according to G.E. Moore, that 'what he was doing was a "new" subject, and...that a "new method" had been found, as had happened when chemistry was developed out of alchemy' (Moore 1959: 322). He often talked of the need to change to 'a new way of thinking' in philosophy. 'The change is as decisive as, for example, that from alchemical to the chemical way of thinking' (CV p. 48e).6 As Rynin points out, Wittgenstein's famous dictum—'Most of the propositions and questions to be found in philosophical works are not false but nonsensical. Consequently we cannot give any answer to questions of this kind, but can only establish that they are nonsensical. Most of the propositions and questions of philosophers arise from our failure to understand the logic of our language* (T 4.003)—is a most Johnsonian assertion! (We need only replace 'nonsensical' with

Alexander Bryan Johnson 39 'insignificant'). Although Wittgenstein's philosophy of language changed radically from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations, his conception of philosophy remained basically the same. For Wittgenstein too, philosophical problems arise from 'our failure to understand the logic of our language' or 'through a misinterpretation of our forms of language' (PI § 111). They cause 'vexations', 'mental cramp', 'knot in our thinking', 'perplexity', 'puzzlement', and 'bewitchment'. (Wittgenstein used these and other terms throughout his writings to describe philosophical problems.) Hence, for Wittgenstein, a philosophical problem has the form Ί don't know my way about' (PI § 123), and he conceives of the task of the new philosophy as 'a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language' (PI § 209). His aim is 'To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle' (PI § 309). As he often emphasized, he didn't solve philosophical problems; he dissolved them. This is clearly shown by the following statement: 'For the clarity we are aiming at is complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear' (PI § 133). To make all philosophical perplexities 'vanish' or 'disappear', both philosophers concentrated much of their efforts on the study of the nature of language—its structure, functions, and limits. According to Johnson, a knowledge of the nature of language is important because it 'bears the same relation to all speculative learning as a knowledge of the qualities of drugs bears to the practice of medicine, or as a knowledge of perspective and colours bears to painting' (MW p. 11). However, he realized that although language has limits, we cannot express these limits in language: 'we can no more exemplify with words that there is a limit to their applicability, than a painter can demonstrate with colours, that there are phenomena which colours cannot delineate' (TL p. 22). Wittgenstein made a similar point: 'What finds its reflection in language, language cannot represent. What expresses itself in language, we cannot express by means of language' (T 4.121). Both philosophers also blame our tendency to misuse language on the inherent structural defects of language and considered it their task to erect warning signs against those defects. Wittgenstein: 'Language sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of easily accessible wrong turnings.... What I have to do then is erect signposts at all the junctions where there are wrong turnings so as to help people past the danger points' (CV p. 18e). Johnson: Ί can afford no better guide to lead you ultimately to a correct understanding of the defects of language, than to say, at a hazard, that I allude to no defects that you ever heard of or conceive. I also allude to none that can be obviated. The most I hope to perform

40 K.T. Fann is to make them known; as we erect a beacon, to denote the presence of a shoal which we cannot remove* (TL p. 33). While both philosophers have a great deal to say about language, it is important to note that both deny trying to provide a general theory of language. Although Wittgenstein discussed certain very general questions about language at great length, he said, according to Moore, 'More than once, that he did not discuss these questions because he thought that language was the subject matter of philosophy—and he emphasized that it was only necessary for him to discuss those points about language which...have led, or are likely to lead, to definite philosophical puzzles or errors' (Moore 1959: 257, 324). Johnson asks his readers to 'remember always, that I have nothing to say about language, except in its relation to unverbal things' (MW p. 137), because he regarded our failure to understand clearly this relationship as the main cause of all philosophical perplexities. Both claim that what they have to say about language are simple and obvious truths which have 'singularly escaped the scrutiny of metaphysicians, while, practically, they have been admitted by all persons. We are prone to disregard what is obvious, and to believe, with an ancient philosopher, that truth lies at the bottom of a well' (Johnson, TL p. 112). And Wittgenstein says 'We are not contributing curiosities however, but observations which no one has doubted, but which have escaped remark only because they are always before our eyes' (PI § 415).

Johnson's Philosophy of Language Johnson's two major philosophical books were entitled A Treatise on Language and The Meaning of Words. It is natural to suppose that Johnson was dealing with language as his subject matter, and consequently his rediscovery aroused interest mainly among semanticists. In fact the first paperback reprint of the Treatise was advertised as 'The Early American classic on Semantics' on its front cover. This emphasis may have been partly responsible for the lack of interest in him among philosophers. Johnson was not a semanticist who happened to have a lot to say about philosophy. On the contrary, he was a philosopher who dealt with philosophical problems through a critique of language. This point may become obvious when we look at the table of contents of the Treatise. The Treatise consists of twenty-nine lectures, each an elaboration and illustration of a proposition stated in the table of contents. Every lecture is further

Alexander Bryan Johnson 41 divided into sections, each an elaboration and illustration of a proposition stated in the beginning of that section (illustration of this is provided for the Introductory Lecture and Lecture ΠΙ). Here are the major propositions: Lecture I. Introduction 1. To know the extent of our powers will save us from impracticable pursuits. 3. We are in danger of wasting time in verbal investigations. 5. No knowledge is more important than correct appreciation of language. 6. Verbal discourse contains defects which have escaped detection. 7. Significant verbal inquisition is not unlimited. 8. Language may be formed into propositions whose results, though incontrovertible by logick, are irreconcilable with our senses. 9. The verbal defects which these discourses will discuss, are inseparable from language, and differ from any defects that you may anticipate. Π. External Sensible Existences are Susceptible of a Classification Which Shall Refer Each Existence to the Sense Through Whose Agency We Acquire Our Knowledge of the Existence ΙΠ. Language Implies a Oneness to Which Nature Conforms Not in All Cases 2. The Oneness of natural existence must not be interpreted by their names, but by our senses. 3. We must subordinate language to what we discover in nature. 4. Verbally, the Oneness of every existence is equally simple, but the natural Oneness varies in different existences. 5. In all our speculations, we estimate created existences by the Oneness of their name. 8. We make language the expositor of words, instead of making nature the expositor of language. 9. We invent theories to reconcile the duality of nature to the Oneness of language. 12. Estimating nature by the Oneness of language is a fallacy which enters deeply into every system of philosophy.

42 K.T. Fann IV. The Oneness Implied by Language Affects Not Only Metaphysical Disquisitions, but Physical Speculations V. Language Implies Identities to Which Nature Conforms Not VI. Words Can Be Divested of Signification, and Still Formed into Propositions Which Will Not Be Obviously Unmeaning VII. The Meaning of a Word Varies with its Application Vm. Every General Proposition Possesses as Many Significations as It Possesses Reference to Different Particulars IX. When the Negation of a Proposition Refers to No Particular, the Negation Is Insignificant, and the Proposition Possesses an Unlimited Affirmation X. Language Can Effect No More Than Refer Us to the Information of Our Senses XII. Much Error Occurs in Our Speculations When We Omit to Discriminate Between the Verbal Meaning of a Word, Its Sensible Meaning, and Its Meaning That Refers to Our Internal Consciousness XVII. Philosophical Speculations Are Often Nothing but Verbal Deductions from Names and Definitions XIX. Every Question Which Relates to the External Universe is Insignificant, If It Cannot Be Answered by Our Senses XX. Every Question Which Relates to What Is Internal of Man, Is Insignificant If It Cannot Be Answered by Our Consciousness XXI. Inquiries after a Theory We Mistake for an Investigation of Nature XXII. Inquiries after the Definition of Words We Mistake for an Investigation of Nature ΧΧΙΠ. In All Inquiries Which Relate to the Sensible Universe, We Must Discriminate the Sense to Whose Information the Inquiry Refers XXIV. We Interpret the Information of Our Senses by Words, Instead of Interpreting Words by the Information of Our Senses XXV. We Often Mistake the Inapplicability of a Word for an Anomaly of Nature XXVI. We Mistake the Unintelligibility of a Word or Proposition for a Mystery of Nature XXVII. Language Cannot Be Made Significant Beyond Our Knowledge XXVIII. We Mistake the Inapplicability of a Process of Language for a Defect or Mystery of Nature

Alexander Bryan Johnson 43 XXIX. We Mistake Words for the Ultimate Objects of Knowledge, While the Revelations of Nature Are Properly the Ultimate Objects In the conclusion to his first book on language Johnson sums up what he considers to have achieved: (1) I have shown, that many phenomena of different senses are so frequently associated, that they are designed in all languages by a single word; and hence we consider phenomena as identical, while identity exists in language only. These phenomena constitute a large class of existences, and a misunderstanding of this simple ambiguity of language has filled the world with metaphysical disquisitions.... (2) Secondly, I have shown that words are merely sounds, which are indebted for signification to the phenomena only that we, by custom or instruction, apply them to. This seems a very obvious characteristic of words, still we frequently employ them when confessedly there are no phenomena to which they can refer.... (3) Thirdly, I have shown that as words have no inherent signification, every word possesses as many significations as it possesses a reference to different phenomena.... (4) Fourthly, I have shown that language can effect no more than to refer us to phenomena.... (5) Fifthly, I have shown that the only use of argumentation is to convince us that what is sought to be established is included in the premises. Or, in other words, we assent to the verbal proposition that a half is less than a whole, when we understand that the word whole implies that it is more than a half. This plain principle also is grossly overlooked; and the oversight is continually inducing men to waste their strength in vain efforts.... I have shown, next, that it is the phenomena to which words refer, that give one word the power of implying another, and that give premises power to command our assent to certain conclusions.... Lastly, I have shown that all which Providence has placed within our grasp, is the sights, tastes, feels, sounds, and smells that our senses reveal to us; that we cannot even ask a significant question unless it refers to these, and every answer is insignificant that has not a similar reference.

44 K.T. Fann The selection from the table of contents and the brief summary of his early work on language clearly show that Johnson was mainly concerned with the limits and defects of language as they affect philosophical speculations. This is emphasized again on the title page of his last work on language. After the long descriptive title (The Meaning of Words: Analysed into Words and Universal Things, and Universal Things Classified into Intellections, Sensations, and Emotions), we find the following statement: 'Four ineradicable fallacies are concealed in the structure of language: it identifies what unverbally are diverse, assimilates what unverbally are heterogeneous, makes a unit of what unverbally are multifarious, and transmutes into each other what unverbally are untransmutable.' Before we go into more detail about Johnson's discussion of specific linguistic defects which lead to philosophical problems and his suggested dissolution of some specific problems, it should be pointed out that Johnson revised some of his views continuously throughout the many years (or rather, decades) he devoted to philosophy. We cannot deal with the whole issue of the development of Johnson's philosophy here, but one major shift in his philosophy needs to be noted at this point. Throughout his life Johnson based his linguistic theory on an empiricist epistemology, but while he was a Nominalist in the Treatise he became a Realist when he wrote The Meaning of Words. In the Treatise his position was that words derived their meanings from either other words or unverbal things, a class which comprises external and internal things. The external things are divided into sights, sounds, tastes, feels, and smells; internal things refer to whatever is present to our consciousness, which he calls internal feelings or emotions. Thoughts and intellectual conceptions are rarely mentioned in the Treatise, and when they are mentioned they are treated as inaudible words and hence regarded as having verbal meanings only. Thus, according to this view, 'Every general proposition possesses as many significations as it possesses reference to different particulars' (TL p. 125) and no more, and God, heaven, hell, immortality, angels, and many other words of the most awful import, are principally significant of scriptural declarations; and of various other words, sentences, and treatises; except that they are significant of certain internal feelings also, which constitute a vivifying and essential part of their signification to persons who happily possess such feelings in association with the words. (TL p. 165)

Alexander Bryan Johnson 45 In The Meaning of Words, Johnson found the above position inadequate, and concluded that there is another class of unverbal things which he calls 'intellections'. Exactly what they are is not clear. They are posited as the unverbal meanings of intellectual conceptions. Ί , at one period, supposed they possess no ulterior meaning, and that all abstract speculations are mere words.... I should probably have continued in this short-sighted belief, had I not found that a vast amount of human learning, including all natural theology, is involved in the issue', declared Johnson (MW p. 200). He described intellectual conceptions and generalizations as 'signs of an unverbal impulse or tendency in the organism of our intellect' (MW p. 202). They 'denote', 'exhibit', 'manifest', 'refer to', 'originate from', 'proceed from', and 'signify' this subjective, internal organism of our intellect (MW pp. 202-224). There are many problems associated with Johnson's theory of intellections, but again we cannot delve into these here. Suffice it to say that his theory of intellections became an integral part of his later philosophy of language and knowledge. Johnson's two other major philosophical books—The Physiology of the Senses and Deep Sea Soundings and Explorations of the Bottom: or The Ultimate Analysis of Human Knowledge—are treatises on what we nowadays would call theory of knowledge. The first deals with 'the limits and latitudes of sensible knowledge;— its discrimination from intellectual inferences and the demarcation of both intellectual and sensible knowledge from our emotional manifestations' (PS p. 5). Although published after his three books on language, Johnson claimed that The Physiology of the Senses ought to have preceded them because it yielded 'principles almost essential to our understanding of the former'. Deep Sea Soundings, Johnson's shortest and last philosophical work, deals with the 'limits and latitudes' of intellectual knowledge. It consists of four chapters: Ί . What we think; or, the analysis of thought'; ΊΙ. How we think'; 'III. What we cannot think'; and 'IV. The order in which we think'. The contents are explorations into the depths of intellectual knowledge by means of an ultimate analysis thereof. Our physical possessions, though illimitable in variety, are, in their essence, unknowable beyond the few elements into which they are analyzable; and the like is true of our intellectual possession. Curiosity desires to delve below, soar above, and advance beyond, these mysterious barriers; but the end is unattainable. (DSS p. 78)

46 K.T. Fann As Wittgenstein would put it later, although he respected the human tendency to 'run against the limits of language', this 'running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless' (cited in Fann 1969: 28). Thus, Johnson conceives of his philosophical task as that of setting limits: in Deep Sea Soundings, the limits of what we can think; in The Physiology of the Senses, the limits of what we can perceive; and in his books on language, the limits of what we can say. Again, the similarity to Wittgenstein is striking. In the Preface to the Tractatus, the latter writes: 'Thus the aim of the book is to set a limit to thought, or rather—not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts [i.e., language].... It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be set, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense.' Again, '[Philosophy] must set limits to what can be thought; and, in doing so, to what cannot be thought. It must set limits to what cannot be thought by working outwards through what can be thought' (T 4.114). The setting of limits, for both philosophers, has the same ulterior motive—i.e., to banish philosophical problems to the other side of the boundary. This is reaffirmed in Johnson's last book. Properly discriminated into its organic classes, all our knowledge is free from mystery, or equally mysterious if we prefer to esteem it mysterious; but we add an unnecessary mystery at our inability to discover sensibly what is not sensible. Human knowledge can be analysed no further than into the organisms to which it pertains; and all attempts to delve below or beyond this boundary are founded in ignorance of the inconvertibility, into each other, of the information yielded by our several organisms. (DSS p. 18) Defects of Language and Philosophical Problems (More Similarity to Wittgenstein) One of the structural defects of language which constantly lead to philosophical puzzlement is, according to Johnson, that 'language implies a oneness to which nature conforms not in all cases' (TL p. 55). Language consists of a very limited number of words, but they are used to talk about infinite numbers of things. And because, for the sake of economy, we use one word to refer to many things, we assume there must be something in common among those things. As Johnson puts it, 'In all our speculation, we estimate created existences by the oneness of their name' (TL p. 57). For example:

Alexander Bryan Johnson 47 The word identity itself is merely a general term, expressive of a multitude of varying existences and relations. A man who is blind from his birth, knows roundness by the feel. Should he attain sight and see a ball, he will not recognize it as the round object of his former amusement. When, however, he shall have learned roundness by the sight, he may inquire how the visible ball and the tangible are identical. Their identity is different from the identity of his person now, and his person a few moments previously. The identity of John when an infant, and the same John when a decrepit old man, differs from both the other identities. The identity which exists between an acorn and the oak from which it originated, differs from all the other identities. To seek in each of these cases for something that is common to them all, and as similar in all as the similarity of the word identity which we apply to them all, is to seek in nature for what is only a contrivance of language. (TL p. 87) Early in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein also fingered this urge to find the common element designated by a general term as a major source of philosophical confusion. To demonstrate his view that there is not one thing in common which makes us use the word 'language' to refer to different phenomena, Wittgenstein writes: Consider for example the proceedings that we call 'games'. I mean boardgames, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?—Don't say: 'There must be something common or they would not be called "games'"—but look and see whether there is anything in common to all.—For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. (PI § 66) Johnson's writings are full of examples illustrating the same point. example:

For

I am speaking, I am standing, several persons are present. Each of these assertions is a truth; but if we seek among these truths for truth itself, believing it to be a unit, we are seeking in nature for what is merely a contrivance of language. 'What is truth?' said Pilate. He supposed it a unit, and hence

48 K.T. Fann the difficulty of the question. All things that we call truths, possess certain general characteristicks; just as snow, salt, silver, and glass, possess certain characteristic!», which entitle them all to the designation of white: but if we wish to ascertain the meaning of the word white in any given case, we must examine the object to which it is applied; and if we wish to know the meaning of the word truth in any given case, we must examine the circumstances to which the word is applied. The oneness of a thousand whites is verbal; and the oneness of a thousand truths is verbal. The unit is a creation of language; hence the fallacy, ambiguity, and difficulty, when we seek in nature for a corresponding unit. (TL p. 73; cf. MW p. 86 and PS p. 194) Johnson again and again draws our attention to this defect of language which makes us 'continue to mystify and perplex ourselves by seeking objectively a oneness that is only subjective; seeking in unverbal things, a oneness that is only verbal; seeking physically, a oneness that is only intellectually conceived' (MW p. 89). Here is another example: 'That light, itself a body, should', says Professor Brown, 'pass freely through solid crystal, is regarded by us as a physical wonder'. Why? No man was ever surprised at finding light enter his room when he threw open his window shutters. Wonder is produced only when we interpret the occurrence by the language in which the occurrence is expressed:—when we suppose the passage of light through crystal to be the same as the passage of my hand through crystal. But when we know that the language is to be interpreted by the fact to which it refers,—(that it means only what crystal and light are continually exhibiting,)—our surprise vanished with the delusion that created it. (TL p. 120) Wittgenstein makes a similar point, in almost Johnsonian language: When we are worried about the nature of thinking, the puzzlement which we wrongly interpret to be one about the nature of a medium is a puzzlement caused by the mystifying use of our language. This kind of mistake recurs again and again in philosophy; e.g., when we are puzzled about the nature of time, when time seems to us a queer thing.—It is not new facts about time

Alexander Bryan Johnson 49 which we want to know. All the facts that concern us lie open before us. But it is the use of the substantive 'time* which mystifies us. (BB p. 6) Another linguistic defect responsible for philosophical confusion is the uniform appearance of words and sentences. Wittgenstein again and again draws our attention to the distinction between the 'surface-grammar' and the 'depth-grammar' of sentences. Compare: 'All roses have thorns' and 'All rods have length*. On the surface both propositions look like empirical generalizations, but while we can imagine roses without thorns, can we also imagine rods without length? The depth grammar of the two propositions is quite different—the first is experiential, while the second is logical or, as Wittgenstein calls it, 'grammatical*. We all know what 'It is 5 o'clock here' means; but do we also know what 'It is 5 o'clock on the sun' means? The surface-grammar of the two statements is alike, but what can one do with the second sentence (PI §§ 348-50)? Wittgenstein regards the inability to distinguish between factual or empirical propositions and logical, conceptual, or grammatical propositions as a major source of metaphysical confusion. As he puts it, 'The essential thing about metaphysics: it obliterates the distinction between factual and conceptual investigation' (Z § 458). Johnson too repeatedly warns us not to be deceived by the grammatical similarity between different kinds of propositions. Should a spark of fire fall amid a room full of gunpowder, what effect will occur? Should a spark of fire fall amid the satellites of Jupiter, what effect will occur? These questions are grammatically alike, yet the last is insignificant, while the first is significant. The significant question inquires after information which my senses can furnish, while the insignificant question inquires after no information which the senses can furnish. (TL p. 243) Here is another example: An Esquimaux Indian will be as positive that water everywhere freezes during the winter, as I am that a piece of gold will everywhere exhibit the sight round, and the feel round, when the piece is so formed that a line drawn from the centre of it to the surface, anywhere, will measure just one inch. Now I know the Esquimaux is mistaken. Countries exist in which water never freezes, and why may not countries exist in which physical objects are so

50 K.T. Fann different from those with which I am acquainted, that a piece of gold may possess the proportions that I have stated, and still not be round? The two propositions are verbally alike, but unverbally different That countries exist in which water never freezes is significant unverbally, for the affirmation refers to the sensible experience of credible witnesses; but the doubt in relation to the gold is merely verbal; or, at most intellectual. (MW p. 190) Like Wittgenstein, Johnson places the main source of metaphysical confusion thus: 'The indiscrimination between what is sensible and what is intellectual constitutes the radical defect of all metaphysics and all logic* (MW p. 46). In The Physiology of the Senses this point is made even clearer: We err not, when we regard as authoritative our intellectual conceptions and sensible perceptions but we err when we fail to discriminate between intellectual conceptions and sensible perceptions.... It constitutes the key to all speculative mysteries, and with it, we may disenchant all the fairy transformations with which scientific men, of every department of learning, delight to amuse and deceive themselves. (PS p. 86)

Dissolution of Some Philosophical

Problems

Johnson dealt with many other defects of language; I have given only a small sample of his insights. In the course of his long philosophical speculations, Johnson had something to say about most of the major philosophical problems. Let me just mention a few of them here: (1) The existence of an external world. 'That seeing, tasting, smelling, and hearing, can yield us no intimation of an external universe, is another puzzling tenet of speculative philosophy, founded on the errour of estimating sensible existences by the oneness of their name, instead of estimating the name by the duality of nature. The word external names usually a sight and a feel. If I look at this table, I discover the sight external; if I touch the table, I realize the feel external. When we speak of external, we should therefore explain to which we allude,—the sight or the feel. This ambiguity was discovered by Locke, but he knew no alternative but to select whether the feel is the real external, or the sight. He selected the feel, and succeeding philosophers have obeyed his decision. Seeing, therefore,

Alexander Bryan Johnson 51 cannot reveal to us an external universe, because we restrict the signification of the word external to the feel' (TL p. 63). (2) The proof of our own existence. 'Perhaps nothing which philosophy has debated is so mysterious as the assertion that we cannot prove the existence of an external universe;—nay, that we cannot prove the existence of ourselves. Descartes supposed that he had accomplished the proof of his own existence at least. He says, "I think, therefore I am". "But", replies Doctor Reid, "how do you prove that you think? If you assume this without proof, you may as well assume your own existence without proof." Doctor Reid admits that to prove these facts is impossible, but that we are bound to believe them, for they constitute a part of our consciousness. "But", says subsequent writer, "how do you prove the existence of the consciousness of which you speak?" 'You perceive the difficulty lies in our inability to prove the facts adverted to. That the facts exist, all men are practically satisfied; but that the facts are incapable of proof is the marvel and the fallacy. We can prove that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles; but we cannot prove that a triangle actually exists in the external universe, or that we exist who employ the process of mathematicks. What a marvel! 'But what is the proof about which we are thus solicitous, and the absence of which is deemed so portentous and mysterious? It is a process of language;—an artificial process of human ingenuity.' Johnson then says that this process is verbal. 'Instead...of knowing that our inability to prove verbally our own existence, (without first assuming it,) is a property of language, we suppose it to be a curiosity of nature, or a portentous mystery' (TL pp. 292-93). (3) Hume's skepticism about causality. 'Hume insisted that no visible connexion exists between any cause and its effect. We apply a spark to gunpowder, and an explosion ensues; "but", says Hume, "we see not that an explosion is necessarily connected with a spark." Cause and effect seem, therefore, either to possess some anomaly, which prevents us from seeing that cause and effect are connected, or they are not connected. But what connexion does Hume allude to as not visible in cause and effect? He alludes to the connexion which is exhibited by the links of a chain. Such a connexion is inapplicable to the nature of cause and effect. Cause and effect exist successively. One only can be present; the other must be either future or past. To talk, therefore, of seeing a cause and its effect connected, as we see the connexion of two links, is to talk of seeing at the same time either a

52 K.T. Fann present sight and a past, or a present and a future. The phrase of Hume, when thus limited, (and thus Hume evidently limited it,) is inapplicable to cause and effect' (TL p. 285). (4) The fallacy of the senses. 'An inattention to the principle of language that I have endeavoured to designate, has produced more errors than many volumes can comprehend; yet I will intrude upon you an enumeration of only one additional class. This relates to the generally received impression that the senses are fallacious. If we thrust a stick into water, and leave a part of its length unimmersed, the stick will appear crooked, which we are told is a fallacy of the senses; for the stick is straight Crooked is supposed to name but one existence, though it names two—a sight and a feel. The sight crooked and the feel possess no identity except the name, by which we confound them. True, they are generally associated, but if we hence infer that they are identical, or even that they never exist disjunctively, we must blame our inexperience. The senses would always have taught us the separability of the sight crooked from the feel, if we had thrust a stick into water' (TL pp. 69-70). (5) Mind and action. "'Our soul possesses the power", says Locke, "of exciting motion by thought; but if we inquire how the soul produces such an effect, we are entirely in the dark." Motion is produced by thought precisely as I experience when I raise my hand to my head.—Locke, however, wanted some theory that should make the process analogous to some external sensible operation, and hence the difficulty. Theories are usually derived from our familiar physical operations; hence, we cannot invent satisfactory theories for mental operations; the two departments of creation not being sufficiently analogous.—Locke evidently attributes the difficulty to a mystery of nature, while it is nothing but the inapplicability to mental phenomena of the verbal process by which we construct theories' (TL pp. 260-61). (6) The problem of free will. 'To reconcile the free agency of man with the omniscience of God, has also been a desideratum of natural theology. I just drank some water, and antecedently I deliberated whether I should drink water or cider. But if actions are known to God before their inception, it was known that I should drink water; hence though I was deliberating, I could not drink cider, or the foreknowledge of God would have been frustrated. If, however, I could not drink the cider, I was not a free agent. But the dilemma is merely verbal. What is the meaning of the term free agent? It can be explained by some sensible phenomenon only. You may tell me that I can either drink or not the water which is before me.

Alexander Bryan Johnson S3 To teach me still more unequivocally, you may show me what it is to be not a free agent. You can withhold my hands, and tell me I am no longer free to drink. Why? Let me try to drink and I shall discover. Hence the term free agent signifies a sensible phenomenon; and if you apply the term to what is not sensible the phrase is divested of signification' (TL pp. 206-7). (7) The argument from design. '"Since something must have existed from eternity", says Paley, in his Natural Theology, "why may not the universe be that something?" He answers thus: "the contrivance which we perceive in the universe proves that it was preceded by a contriver, and hence it existed not eternally." But why does a contrivance imply a contriver? Because both words refer to our operations. In them only the implication possesses a sensible signification. I would ask (but reverently) whether the appearance of Deity would not exhibit a contrivance as evidently as the universe? If it would, even Deity could not have been eternal: for a contrivance implies a previous contriver. Language is inadequate to such speculations; they are even impious. The heathen make graven images—we make verbal ones; and the heathen worship not more ardently the work of their hands, than we the woik of our pens' (TL p. 205). All of the above problems, and many more, are worked out at length in Johnson's writings, and I have chosen only a few to display the consistency with which Johnson applies his linguistic insights to the problems of philosophy.

Some Anticipations of Other Modern Ideas As Stillman Drake, David Rynin, and others have noticed, Johnson anticipated many of the doctrines and ideas which were fashionable and regarded as novel one hundred years later. Some examples are: Meaning as use. 'Words have no inherent signification; but as many meanings as they possess applications to different phenomena' (TL p. 84). And again: 'If we wish to know the meaning of the word truth in any given case, we must examine the circumstances to which the word is applied' (TL p. 73). Compare these statements to Wittgenstein: 'But let's not forget that a word hasn't got a meaning given to it, as it were, by the power independent of us.... A word has the meaning someone has given to it' (BB p. 28). And the famous Wittgensteinian dictum: 'For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word

54 K.T. Fann "meaning" it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language* (PI § 43). The verification principle. The well-known principle of the Logical Positivists is clearly mirrored in the following passage: 'To say that the earth is a sphere, that it revolves round the sun, and round its own axis, and that we possess antipodes, are truths so long as we consider the expressions significant of certain phenomena to which the propositions refer. If you inquire of an astronomer whether the earth is a sphere, he will desire you to notice what he terms the earth's shadow in an eclipse of the moon, the gradual disappearance of a ship as it recedes from the shore, &c. After hearing all that he can adduce in proof of the earth's sphericity, consider the proposition significant of these proofs. If you deem it significant beyond them, you are deceived by the forms of language' (TL p. 12829). And assertions such as: 'The moon and the sun cause the tides', and 'Every fixed star is a sun' 'are all significant of some observations, some calculations, or of at least some thing; whilst a negation of them may refer to nothing; and hence be insignificant' (TL p. 142). Similarly, a theory 'is significant of nothing but the data which are adduced in proof of the theory' (TL p. 236). Instrumentalism and operationalism. Both are reflected in this passage: 'Theories are beneficial to science; but when we say that water ascends in a vacuum by means of the pressure of the atmosphere, we should discriminate the theoretical pressure from the feel to which the word pressure is ordinarily applied. Pressure, like every other word, possesses no invariable signification, nor any inherent signification. Its signification is governed by the existence to which we attach it. When it refers to the effort of my hand against this table, it names a feel; and when applied to the ascent of water in a vacuum, it names the ascent. If we suppose it names also some insensible operation of the air on the water, this is merely our theory, which signifies nothing; or rather it signifies all to which we refer in proof of the pressure. 'If we keep in view this distinction between theoretical agents and the realities of nature, we shall at once discover the absurdity of continuing the employment of theoretical agents beyond the uses which they subserve to science. If the attribution of a pressure to air enables us to methodise numerous phenomena which are exhibited by the air-pump and barometer, &c., the attribution is valuable; but we should not continue the verbal machinery beyond this utility, and much less should we deduce therefrom that every man sustains a pressure of fourteen tons;—a conclusion which I believe is not subservient to any use, and is therefore only an

Alexander Bryan Johnson SS evidence that the persons who make the deduction are ignorant of the true nature of language' (TL pp. 226-27). The nature of scientific theory. Johnson's unique view on scientific theories is reminiscent of Thomas Kuhn. 'Causation and effectuation are probably suggested originally to the intellect by what we experience almost incessantly in our tactile performances. An animal who could will no effects...might possess no intellectual notions of power or causation.... Earthquakes, which the intellect formerly caused by the struggles of imprisoned Titans, are now improved causatively by our knowledge of gunpowder, steam, and I suppose galvanism, electricity, &c; for a man's intellect can but suggest to him all his knowledge that it deems analogous to the causation in question. A hound who follows a fox by the scent, will conceive that huntsmen and horses follow by the scent also, if we may suppose that hounds can speculate. If birds possess an intellect that can speculate, its cosmogony will be founded on the incubation of eggs; and its solar system will employ wings as we use gravity; and the system will be as satisfactory to their intellects as Newton's is to ours, both being alike subjective to the conceiving intellects respectively' (PS pp. 157-59). The emotive theory of value. 'As we call water hot when it produces heat in us, so we call an event surprising when it excites in us the feeling of surprise, and admirable when it excites in us the feeling of admiration. Whatever excites in us a feeling of wonder, we call wonderful; what excites our love, we call lovely; what hurts us, we call hurtful; and what pleases us; pleasurable.—Our adjectives are generally thus subjective: a cheerful day is a day that excites cheerfulness in us; a gloomy sound is a sound that excites gloom in us, &c.' (PS pp. 210-11). Respect for ordinary language. Wittgenstein's respect for ordinary language is so well known that he and his followers were sometimes labeled 'ordinary language philosophers'. He used to say in his lectures, 'We are going to find out that everything is all right except what the philosophers say. What the bed-maker says is all right, but what they say is all wrong' (quoted in Fann 1967: 338). Johnson remarks, 'Our forms of speech exhibit our organization about as necessarily and as accurately as wax exhibits the lineaments of the seal which impresses it; and a better philosophy floats in our colloquial phraseology than phraseology receives credit for' (MW p. 51). In Deep Sea Soundings Johnson derived what he called 'the triplicity of man (i.e., man is intellectual, physical, and emotional)' from the way ordinary people talk: 'The most illiterate person is practically conscious of his triplicity—and he will say, "I heard a noise; I saw a color; I tasted

56 K.T. Fann an acid": and he will discriminate equally well the two other senses when he is referring to their information. With like accuracy, he will attribute to his emotional organism the feelings which pertain thereto, and say, "I feel hopeful; I feel angry..." &c.: and, when he speaks of his intellectual processes, he will employ words designative of his intellect; as, "I think I met A yesterday; I remember his appearance..." &c.'(DSS p. 7). Thus, he recommends elsewhere: 'when my intellect is uncertain as to the organism to which any word refers on any given use thereof, the forms of phraseology will usually resolve the uncertainty, as, for instance, is doubt intellectual, emotional, or sensible? It is emotional, for phraseologically, we say, I feel in doubt, I feel dubious, &c.... The evidence of phraseology... is specially authoritative, by reason of the spontaneous formation of phraseology' (PS pp. 191-92). At the end of Johnson's last book, he writes: I have devoted an unusually long life to speculations which the present terminate; and I claim, that they constitute a better intellectual philosophy than can be found elsewhere, and more intelligible. This may not be saying much, and succeeding investigations will, I hope, accomplish more. For no person is better assured than I, that an abundant scope exists for a fruition of the hope. (DSS p. 78) It would be interesting to speculate what course the history of Western philosophy would have taken if Johnson's philosophy had received wide acceptance a century ago. Needless to say, there are defects in Johnson's philosophy. With the late twentieth-century hindsight, some of the defects are easy to see—such as his narrow empiricism and his restrictive reference theory of meaning. (These and others are dealt with in Rynin's 'Critical essay' in Johnson 1947 and Max Black's article in Todd and Blackwood 1969.) However, Johnson's merits deserve more attention than his defects. Let me end this report by saying, ά la Johnson, that Ί have opened a mine which contains much precious metal, but what I exhibit are only rude specimens of the ore' (MW p. 212). Notes 1.

All biographical and bibliographical information on Johnson are contained in Rynin 1947 and Todd and Blackwood 1969.

Alexander Bryan Johnson 57 2. 3.

The full story is given in Drake 1969. Drake distributed a number of reprints of his Etc. article, one of which was sent to Wittgenstein; Rynin also sent Wittgenstein a copy of his edition of Johnson's Treatise. Both received courteous acknowledgments from Wittgenstein without any comments. It would be most interesting to know if Wittgenstein read them, and if so, what his reaction was. 4. The two references are Shaw 1980 and Tagliagambe 1981. The longer reference is Gura 1981. 5. Quotations from Johnson's books are designated by the following abbreviations: TL = A Treatise on Language, David Rynin's edition; MW = The Meaning of Words (1854); PS = The Physiology of the Senses (1856); and DSS = Deep Sea Soundings (1861). 6. Citations from Wittgenstein are abbreviated as follows: Τ = Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus; PI = Philosophical Investigations; CV = Culture and Value; Ζ = Zettel; and BB = The Blue and Brown Books.

References Drake, Stillman 1969 Back from limbo: The rediscovery of Alexander Bryan Johnson. In Language and Value: Proceedings of the Centennial Conference on the Life and Works of Alexander Bryan Johnson, C.L. Todd and R.T. Blackwood (eds.), 3-15. New York: Greenwood Publishing Co. Fann, K.T. 1969 Wittgenstein's Conception of Philosophy. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Fann, K.T. (ed.) 1967 Wittgenstein: The Man and His Philosophy. New York: Dell Publishing Co. Gura, Philip F. 1981 Language and meaning: An American tradition. American Literature 53 (March), 2-7. Johnson, Alexander Bryan 1828 The Philosophy of Human Knowledge, or A Treatise on Language. New York: G. and C. Carvill.

58 K.T. Fann 1836

A Treatise on Language: or The Relation which Words Bear to Things. New York: Harper and Bros. 1854 The Meaning of Words. New York: D. Appleton and Co. 1856 The Physiology of the Senses. New York: Derby and Jackson. 1861 Deep Sea Soundings and Explorations of the Bottom; or The Ultimate Analysis of Human Knowledge. Boston. Moore, G.E. 1959 Wittgenstein's lectures in 1930-33. In Philosophical Papers, 322. London: George Allen and Unwin. Rynin, David (ed.) 1947 Alexander Bryan Johnson: A Treatise on Language, with a Critical Essay on Johnson's philosophy of language. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1969 Alexander Bryan Johnson's treatise on morality. In Language and Value: Proceedings of the Centennial Conference on the Life and Works of Alexander Bryan Johnson, C.L. Todd and R.T. Blackwood (eds.), 22. New York: Greenwood Publishing Co. Shaw, W.D. 1980 The optical metaphor—Victorian poet and the theory of knowledge. Victorian Studies 23, 306-7. Tagliagambe, Silvano 1981 The languages of science. Scientia 116, 546. Todd, Charles L. and Blackwood, Russell T. (eds.) 1969 Language and Value: Proceedings of the Centennial Conference on the Life and Works of Alexander Bryan Johnson. New York: Greenwood Publishing Co. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1922 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1953 Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1958 The Blue and Brown Books. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1967 Zettel. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1980 Culture and Value. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. K.T. Fann (b. 1937) is Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Atkinson College, York University, in North York, Ontario. His principal research interests include Marxism and Chinese philosophy. Among his publica-

Alexander Bryan Johnson 59 tions are Symposium on J.L. Austin (ed., 1969), Peirce's Theory of Abduction (1970), From the Other Side of the River: A Self-Portrait of China Today (1975), Lao Tzu's Tao Teh Ching: A New English Translation (1981), and Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations: A Chinese Translation (1989). Address: Department of Philosophy, York University - Atkinson College, 4700 Keele Street, North York, Ontario M3J 1P3, Canada.

The Semiotics of Levi-Strauss: Communication

Translation as

Roland A. Champagne

The Costume-Designer as Ethnologist Claude Livi-Strauss, renowned for his contributions as an ethnologist to French Structuralism, is also a semiotician. While he used as a working definition of a sign Peirce's formula of 'that which replaces something for someone' (LdviStrauss 1960: 629), Livi-Strauss examined various sign systems from an ethnologist's perspective. The sign as a vehicle of replacement was particularly applicable in his career as he sought to translate information cross-culturally in his pursuit of the universal 'human spirit'. His version of semiotics entailed the communication of information resulting from translating sign systems from one culture to another. As an ethnologist, he studied kinship systems, myths, totemism, and masks, especially among North and South American Indian tribes and then on a global basis. Within this focus, he invented the method of the ethnological context as a means of presenting the problems of semiotics he encountered with translation as communication. In his acceptance speech to the College de France in 1960, L6vi-Strauss announced that his goal for ethnology, known in the United States as cultural anthropology, was 'to spread humanism to all humanity' (1967: 52). Within this framework, he did and would continue to struggle with the nature of that common humanity. Some ten years before this, he had been commissioned by UNESCO to study the problems of racism throughout the world. In his pamphlet on the issue, he proposed a 'dynamic tolerance' (1952: 85) to rid the world of monocultural hegemony impeding communication among neighbors of different cultural backgrounds. This 'dynamic tolerance' was promoted throughout his career by his own ongoing attempts to find common denominators among kinship systems, totemism, masks, and myths in geographically and historically remote cultures and to relate them in paradigms he called 'structures', which were part of larger 'systems' of signs. In his attempts to find the humane glue within these systems, he often sought to transpose the network of one system of signs into that of

62 Roland Α. Champagne another, thus tracing the communicative analogies within humanity. In this way, L6vi-Strauss intended to show the semiotic 'passage from external analogy to internal homology' (1963c: 78). The 'internal homology' would demonstrate to all the unity of the human spirit.

Plate 1. Claude L6vi-Strauss (photo by Isolde Ohlbainen)

Claude Livi-Strauss 63 L6vi-Strauss's adolescent interests in opera offer insight into the semiotics he identified during his career as an ethnologist. As a youngster, he spent a considerable amount of time drawing costumes and sets for operas. Reflecting upon this activity, he remembers his desire to become a costume and set designer 'to try to express in one language, that is, the language of graphic arts and painting, something which also exists in music and in the libretto' (1979: 9). Thus began his interest in the nature of meaning as 'the ability of any kind of data to be translated in a different language' (1979: 12). His experimentation with the various 'languages' of opera led him into a serious search for the rules whereby humanity could understand the codes of cultures isolated in different temporal and/or spatial conditions. His ethnological stpdies often draw upon the similarities of myths, family structures, or artifacts within cultures assumed to be different or incompatible prior to his mathematically modeled charts and schemes. As a structuralist, L6vi-Strauss derives his primary inspiration from the taxonomies of structural linguistics. Guided principally by Roman Jakobson, his lifelong friend since their collaboration at the New School for Social Research in New York during the 1940s, he studied the transformational patterns of language. He was soon enmeshed in the problems of translation, as he published articles both in French and in American English. However, language was only one of the sign systems within which Levi-Strauss sought to translate meaning in an ethnological context. It is especially appropriate that, in his study of kinship systems (1949), one of the crucial discoveries is that certain rules for family structures, such as the incest taboo, were invented by men in order to control the exchange of women and thereby to govern the future of family and social structures. Women were literally translated as gifts through kinship systems in which their powers of marriage and reproduction were limited by cultural agreements on the nature of kinship. Women themselves could not translate their own power, whereas men transformed them into reified tokens of cultural hegemony. Contemporary feminism has appreciated this insight as 'structuralism's major contribution to feminist theory' (Gallop 1982: 133). This ethnological application of the translation problems of language led L6viStrauss into the realms of mythology and music. These two sign systems offered contrasts with language as he investigated the problems of cultural translation. He was especially struck by the semantic presence in language of phonemes, words, and sentences, which constitute different levels of meaning. By contrast with this paradigm of language, mythology and music lack individual levels of meaning.

64 Roland Α. Champagne For instance, in mythology, 'you have an equivalent to words, an equivalent to sentences, but you have no equivalent to phonemes' (1979, 53). L£vi-Strauss did posit the equivalence between 'mythemes' and phonemes; however, mythemes are components of myth and not ultimate determinations of meaning, as phonemes are. So, while mythology, as the corpus of stories passed on within a cultural context to convey a cosmology and/or the meanings of rituals, is a system of signs with its own internal integrity, L6vi-Strauss concluded after more than 45 years' acquaintance with myths from around the world that, by analogy to language, mythology lacks the phonemic level of language systems. In music, by contrast, L6vi-Strauss finds equivalences with language systems at the levels of phoneme and sentence, but not that of words (1979: 52). In opera, for example, the music and the words operate on two separate levels, even though opera-lovers often link the two by association. Livi-Strauss's own flirtation with linking words and music in Le cru et le cuit (cf. 1969) results in affirmations of the gap between the formal possibilities of music and the content-oriented realities of words. He is not able to integrate the systems of language and music at the level of verbal meaning. There is a level missing in both mythology and music when they are compared with language. These absent components create special problems for the ethnologist who tries to find what is common in different cultures and to express these invariants through the use of language. In other systems of communication, L6vi-Strauss tries to discover ways to bridge the gaps in translating. I shall call these other systems 'semiological', because he treats them as through they each have their own integral logic as systems of signs. He attempts to find logical explanations whereby language could translate their entire semantic systems. These systems trace the network of social purposes for masks, rituals, costumes, totems, tools, and kinship. All of them have in common a displacement of appearances, reminding us of Peirce's definition of the sign as a 'replacement of something for someone'. By means of these sign systems, each culture mediates meaning by introducing entropy or noise to preclude total communication of what a thing appears to be. Each system of signs he examines lacks the intermediary level of meaning present in language. L6vi-Strauss explains this absence as the control of nature by culture. In all cultures, the uniqueness of human identity is stubbornly assigned as a type of untranslatable disorder through 'culture', which L6vi-Strauss defines as 'a mediation of the relationships between humanity and the world' (1965: 21).

Claude L6vi-Strauss 65 In order to identify the untranslatable disorder in each culture, L£vi-Strauss devised the 'ethnographic context*. This context is the totality of information constituting the semantic horizons of the sign system and culture under examination. Once he does this research, L6vi-Strauss applies the celebrated method of the bricoleur ('a resourceful composer') because of its propriety for ethnology and the human sciences. The pure sciences, such as engineering, have a dream of plenitude within which knowledge can be attained by the systematic tracking of truth. However, in the human sciences, L6vi-Strauss claims that the subject is much more slippery. The sign systems of human communication operate such that one sign leads to another sign by playfully erasing its antecedent. This erasure precludes the recovery of an original artifact or referent upon which a communication is based. Therefore, Livi-Strauss must be a 'bricoleur', a composer intent on establishing relationships among the terms of a system since 'signification hinges on position* (1988: 197). The ethnologist seeks to answer the question of meaning when faced with the apparent disorder in a system of signs caused by the introduction of a culture foreign to its integrity. In effect, L£vi-Strauss realizes that, like the costume designer he was as an adolescent, 'we are obliged to "translate" in our language system, rules primitively given in a different language system' (1960: 629). In his efforts to resolve the problems of translating meaning, L6vi-Strauss provides an ethnological context for semiotics. This context involves the semiotician in learning to communicate among various systems of signs for the purpose of reducing the 'noise' the indigenous culture interjects in a given sign system. This noise takes various forms, depending upon which system of signs and which cultural context are being examined in their totality. Circumscribing a cultural context (what L^vi-Strauss calls 'totalizing') is an ambitious project, and very risky because it implies the ability to place limits on the semantic horizons of a given culture. The ethnologist is usually an outsider to the culture and the sign system being examined, which fact brings the traduttore/traditore ('translator/ traitor') relation into play. Livi-Strauss is well aware of this problem, and tries to deal with it by accounting for the relationships among the parts of different sign systems. These relationships provide a network wherein all the details can be subsumed. Contextual relationships are crucial in structural linguistics, which investigates the minimal pairs of phonemics with the goal of developing a theory of information and ultimately a theory of translation. Similarly for Livi-Strauss, contextual relationships provide a sense of linkage and continuity not only within

66 Roland Α. Champagne a given structure (for example, in the phonemic structure of language), but also between the structures of the same sign system (e.g., words and sentences in language). Therefore, within various sign systems other than language, L6viStrauss characterizes the structuralist approach as 'the quest for the invariant, or the invariant elements among superficial differences' (1979: 8). The 'invariant' regulates relationships on each level of a system and thus provides a means of explaining transitions from one level of meaning to another and transformations of structures within the same sign system. L6vi-Strauss thus advocates structure as a means of understanding similarities and differences, accounting for change—both internal and external to the system of signs under consideration—by analogy to other sign systems. The substitution of components among different sign systems helps L6viStrauss explain the enigmatic metamorphosis of a sign in a given cultural context. In this crucial mimicking of the sign's functioning as a replacement process L6viStrauss privileges the sign system of music, because especially in music the form—particularly the form of serialized music—provides a model for what appears to be lost when the sign acts as a palimpsest, erasing most of the traces of an original referent. Because of his research into the links between language and music sign systems, it is now recognized that 'the strategy of patterning intellectual prose after musical structures is indebted to Claude L6vi-Strauss' (McClary, in C16ment 1988: x). Since Livi-Strauss's expositions are part of the sign system of language, his intention to translate the formal unity of other sign systems must involve the transformation of another sign system into language. There are also some common denominators involved in humanity adjusting to the semiotic challenges of translating its world for purposes of communication. A.J. Greimas defines this type of semiotics as 'how humanity conceives, organizes, and humanizes its world' (1970: 31). Notice that humanity is portrayed as the interface between the world and the activities of communication. As an ethnologist, Ldvi-Strauss agrees with this view of semiotics while also qualifying it by showing that the plurality of human cultures have produced a limited number of sign systems to translate human relationships and to act as interfaces with that world. Let us look at how L6vi-Strauss presents these translations.

Claude L6vi-Strauss 67 The Language Model Appropriately, Jakobson's Linguistic Circle of New York titled its journal Word. The word was the focus of attention in a sign system whose levels of meaning included phonemes, words, and sentences. In 1945, L6vi-Strauss published an essay in that journal on structural analysis in linguistics and anthropology. Indeed, the Word was also the fitting title of a forum for the Livi-Strauss article, because he was transposing the Prague School models for linguistic analysis into an anthropological setting, all the while assuming that words were crucial elements in the sign systems analyzed by linguistics and anthropology. For anthropology (a.k.a. ethnology), words are analogous to the basic constituent elements of meaning within any system of signs. For example, just as words are intermediaries between phonemes and sentences in language, so the avuncular (the uncle or aunt relationship) is a key to understanding certain kinship systems which are neither patrilineal nor matrilineal. L6vi-Strauss claims that the avuncular is the key relationship, 'the atom' of kinship systems, accounting for the structure of kinship systems in which neither the mother nor the father account for the family's organization. It is not always clear, when L6vi-Strauss uses linguistic models, whether or not he is speaking about analogous models. A case in point is his brief joint venture with Jakobson into literary criticism, in which they attempt to demonstrate the paradigm of language in a poetic text. However, they fail to recognize that a literary text such as Baudelaire's 'Les Chats' is a sophisticated work, structured much more complexly than a spoken speech act. Jakobson's axes of combination and equivalence for linguistic messages provide a neat model for binary oppositions within the poem (Jakobson and L6vi-Strauss 1962). However, those axes are intended for linguistic taxonomies, not unlike the binary phonemic analyses performed by Trubetzkoy (1949). Michael Riffaterre, who has given us an exemplary semiotic model for the analysis of poetry (1978), rejects the L6viStrauss/Jakobson application to 'Les Chats' as too naive an application of linguistic methods in poetics, because sign systems are not simply isomorphic: 'just because they do have common components, one system cannot be used to explain another' (1970: 224). Even within the sign system of language, distinctions have to be made among subsystems such as spoken and written speech acts. Within such a literary product as a poem, phonemes and words which recur have different functions in diverse contexts. Hence parallel words or phonemes identified by

68 Roland Α. Champagne L£vi-Strauss and Jakobson as consistently common to several verses are in fact not really invariant structures, but rather operatives within different structures, words and sentences having unique settings that cannot be ignored for the sake of a vertical axis uniting apparent similarities in phonemic or verbal units. L6vi-Strauss did learn from this experiment with literary criticism that translations must be context-sensitive to both the original sign system and the target sign system. So, instead of transposing binary models for the sake of a balanced chart, he adapted the models of structural linguistics based on the relationships among phonemes, words, and sentences. Instead of imposing taxonomic categories from one system onto another, he learned to appreciate the changing character of each sign system in itself. He was especially influenced by Trubetzkoy's (1949) analysis of the distinctive features of phonemes: phonemes are classified according to the structures (words, sentences) to which they belong. Their classification is binary according to whether or not a particular phoneme possesses a certain property (e.g., voiced or not voiced). Attracted by the notion of basic constituent parts being sensitive to their environments, L6vi-Strauss for his part sought to identify, analogically, the basic constituent parts of myths, which he called 'mythemes'. Still influenced by Jakobson's strategy of identifying vertical and horizontal axes in a poetic message (I960), he adapted axes for myths from the Saussurean repertoire and called them langue and parole. Language thus appears to be, once again, the analogical model for his translations. The coordinates of langue and parole helped Livi-Strauss to explain the intersection of community and individual in myths. However, the binary method could not deal with the distinctions in meanings that have to be made at all levels. For example, his analysis of the Oedipus myth (1963b) and its variants entails the arbitrary binary distinctions of langue and parole. These linguistic terms are not well-suited to describe the context of the mythological world from which Sophocles adapted the Oedipus myth. Marcel Detienne, a Hellenist at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, objects to L6vi-Strauss's analysis because of the assumption of 'a chain of relations, a succession of concepts, a system of signifying oppositions distributed on different planes, at various semantic levels' (1979: 7). The words and their historical contexts are ignored by L6vi-Strauss because he is aiming at interrupting the application of the Oedipus myth rather than comprehending its reading: 'myths of the Oedipal kind.. .are widely distributed throughout the world and deal with an excessive communication that must be interrupted to avoid abuse' (1987a: 108). His 'mythemes' are meant to reduce the 'excessive communication'

Claude Livi-Strauss 69 by isolating certain common denominators whereby the variations of the myth are exactly located as relationships on a chart represented by a paradigm of vertical and horizontal axes. Such a chart ignores narrative progression and the historical context of the words even though the object of analysis, the myth, was constituted by language in a specifiable ethnographic context: the Oedipus Cycle by Sophocles, a literary speech act written in the fifth century B.C. L6vi-Strauss claims that he learned from his excursion into poetry that 'poetry is a kind of speech which cannot be translated except at the cost of serious distortions whereas the mythical value of the myth is preserved even through the worst translation' (1963b: 210). But mycologists objected to his transposition of myth in this manner. In his attempts at translating the poetry of Baudelaire and the myth of Oedipus, Livi-Strauss still falls short in proposing the structuralist language model as a fitting vehicle for the translation of different sign systems into one another. Livi-Strauss did modify the adaptation of the language model even further by insights he derived from other disciplines. He maintains that he was especially influenced in ethnology by three disciplines which he calls his 'mistresses': geology, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. In all three, there is a respect for the hierarchical layering of 'truth'. Whether there be layers of sediment, ideological imbedding, or the structuring of consciousness, each discipline is involved in uncovering the substance beneath the surface. L6vi-Strauss sees a similar layering occurring in language. As a result, he prefers to analyze language vertically as well as horizontally. On the one hand, grammar assists him in developing the syntagmatic or contiguous links in a language sequence. On the other hand, semantics provides him with the paradigmatic or vertical dimension of linguistic meanings. This linguistic model for structure, combining the grammatical and the semantic studies of language, allowed L6vi-Strauss to reproduce systems on a grid with a horizontal and a vertical axis. The coordinates of this grid supply a grammatical order for the literal meaning of a sign system's context while also providing for a semantic order whereby other systems can be compared and contrasted along a symbolic vertical or diagonal axis. The work of Marcel Mauss, especially his 'Essai sur le don' (1924), introduced L6vi-Strauss to the possibilities of social systems within the human sciences, specifically ethnology. Ldvi-Strauss was impressed that, in the work of Mauss, 'for the first time in the history of ethnological thinking...an effort was made to transcend empirical observation and to reach deeper realities' (1987b: 38). Mauss

70 Roland Α. Champagne taught L6vi-Strauss that the collective called the social is a system of signs 'among whose parts, connections, equivalences and interdependent aspects can be discovered' (1987b: 38). These relationships between the parts are called 'operations' by Mauss; they reminded L6vi-Strauss of the linguistic studies of connections by Jakobson and Trubetzkoy, with the added dimension of potlatch, so much a part of the ethnologist's work. Mauss insisted that all social phenomena could be assimilated by language, especially in semantic derivations of the symbolic nature of social practices. Inspired by Mauss, L6vi-Strauss attenuated his lessons from structural linguistics with his own ethnological appreciation of the value of ethnological contexts. Once again, Jakobson's binary distinctions—this time between metaphor and metonymy—helped Livi-Strauss in improving the application of a language model within an ethnographic context. On the one hand, metonymy (the use of one word as a substitute for another) is in fact the application in language of a part for a whole. This verbal device exemplifies the horizontal axis of language wherein the grammatical sentence provides the unity of the total speech act. Likewise, it is a verbal analogy for the relationships of structure, sign system, and culture, all components in the network of parts to a whole. On the other hand, metaphor (the comparison of one word to another) exemplifies the vertical or paradigmatic axis of language whereby semantics explores the meanings operating at different levels of the speech act. It is within this dimension that Livi-Strauss explores the possibility of an 'internal homology' uniting the entire human spirit, which he assumes to exist cross-culturally. He creates what might be called his ideal of structural analysis in this regard with his presentation of the Asdiwal myth. It is with this presentation that we first encounter 'the ethnological context' as conceived by L6vi-Strauss. The Asdiwal myth was recounted on the Pacific coast of Canada with several variations in its narrative and the possibility of meaning on geographic, economic, sociological, and cosmological levels. Levi-Strauss presents this story in an ethnological context to provide a matrix of meaning for the network of his vertical and horizontal axes. By explaining the context—the tribes narrating the myth, the region of British Columbia from which they came, the economic lives of the peoples, and their social and family organization—L6vi-Strauss enables the variations of the story to be elaborated on the metonymic or horizontal spatial plane. Then he explains the metaphoric projections of the myth on the four semantic levels through schemata. These schemata were necessary because, as Mauss taught

Claude Ldvi-Strauss 71 him, 'the myth is certainly related to given facts, but not as a representation of them, the relationship is of a dialectical kind, and the institutions described in the myths can be the very opposite of real institutions' (1976: 172). So vertical explanations of the levels of meaning help to demonstrate the sense of the contradictions between the story and its historical context. This elaboration of the significance of the Asdiwal myth was heralded by mythologists as a model of structural analysis. Detienne specifically appreciated the methodological precedent of the 'ethnographic context', which inspired the formation of a contextualist school around Jean-Pierre Vemant with his colleagues then at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes: 'L6vi-Strauss is the one who has taught mythologists that in order to understand the signification of a plant or animal, it is necessary to determine each time precisely which role each culture attributes to that plant or animal within a classification system' (1979: 8). Livi-Strauss derived the method from linguistics. However, the sign system provides only very abstract inspiration for his analysis of the Asdiwal myth. L£vi-Strauss looked at myths as sign systems in themselves, to be translated back to language by virtue of their own internal logic mediated by the cultures in which they occurred.

Myth as Religious

Representation

Upon his appointment to the College de France in 1960, L^vi-Strauss began a new phase in his ethnological research. In 1962, he published Totemism and La pensie sauvage. Both attest to the beginning of his focus upon what he calls, in his autobiographical interviews, 'religious representations' (L6vi-Strauss and Eribon 1988: 104). Myths fascinated him throughout his career. As 'religious representations', they become for him sign systems with their own innate coherence. In his notes from the College de France on 'Asdiwal revisited', he remarks that the multiplicity of levels and versions in the Asdiwal myth constitute a unique paradigm: 'the symmetry evident between them all belongs to the field of myth, not of lived experience' (1987a: 100). Effectively, the myth contains its own world of representation, which must be translated into language for others to appreciate. By contrast with the three levels of structure in a language sign system, myth has only two levels: its words and its sentences. Although L6vi-Strauss attempted to posit mythemes as basic constituents of meaning analogous to the

72 Roland Α. Champagne phonemes of language, he and others have concluded that mythemes cannot be isolated. While mythemes were presented as components of the Oedipus myth which Livi-Strauss acknowledged as being universal, the mythemes themselves could not be universalized to include all myths. Thus, myths begin their existence with a leap of faith in the viability of words to represent and in sentences to link up these representations about the relationship of humanity to the universe. Above all, in his Kantian inspiration, L£vi-Strauss recognized that myth 'gives man, very importantly, the illusion that he can understand the universe and that he does understand the universe: it is, of course, only an illusion' (1979: 17). In the formation of that illusion, humanity shares certain beliefs in myths as carriers of its spiritual values. In the sharing of myths by single tribes and then, as LiviStrauss demonstrates, as part of a universal human experience, ideally 'it could be that all mythology leads, in the final analysis, to the posing and resolution of a problem of communication' (1987a: 108)—specifically, translation as communication. Vladimir Propp attempted in 1928 to provide a formalist model for the linear sequence of story-telling in his Morphology of the Folktale. In his taxonomy of the functions operating in folktales, he noted that 'correct classification is one of the first steps in a scientific description' (1968: 5). Livi-Strauss admired what Propp did, but also distinguished structure from form. Whereas form implies a separation from content, L6vi-Strauss sought to explain the story in its form and content. In addition, Propp's analysis was based on the linear or horizontal axis of folktales, to the exclusion of the paradigmatic or vertical axis, the domain of semantics. Propp was an important influence on L6vi-Strauss, but the French ethnologist has a more expansive vision of 'the essence of myths...which is to revive a forgotten past, to apply it like a grid to the present in order to discover here a meaning where the two faces of history and structure coincide' (1967: 5). Once again, the grid of horizontal and vertical axes helped Livi-Strauss in translating one sign system into another. These axes, along with mathematical rules of combination and selection within matrices, guided him in devising the conditions under which myths are translated from one culture to another, transformed by each culture's mediation of the story. The uniqueness of myth is a problem. Although L6vi-Strauss recognizes that 'every myth is by its very nature a translation and...originates in another myth from a neighboring but foreign people' (1981: 573), he also portrays myth as having the least to lose in translation, at the opposite pole from poetry, which is

Gaude Livi-Strauss 73 steeped in the phonemes of language. While myth lacks the particular level analogous to the phoneme in language, it appears to have structures analogous to word and sentence which could be transposed from its system to that of language. As levels of meaning, the structures of word and sentence cohere on the vertical axes with other systems of signs through symbolic extensions. Rather than the mere literal analysis of myths as performed by Propp, Livi-Strauss envisioned that 'the basic meaning of the myth is not conveyed by the basic sequence of events but.. .by bundles of events even though these events appear at different moments in the story' (1979: 45). As he explored the role of symbols in myths, L6vi-Strauss received criticism from Paul Ricoeur. The latter's hermeneutical approach to symbols was derived from Heidegger. For Ricoeur, symbolic activity represents a metaphysical hierarchy of values. Ricoeur criticized L6vi-Strauss for positing 'the Kantian unconscious' (1963: 600), assuming incorrectly that the symbol was pointing toward an 'internal homology' rather than an external system of conscious religious values. In reply, L6vi-Strauss stated that he was flattered to be called Kantian and insisted that the symbolism in myths did indeed point internally to a unity in the human spirit. For example, the Botocudo myths of Brazil use the analogous symbols of honey and tobacco to portray the similar limits the tribes sense about controlling their own fate. While raw honey ties the tribes to nature, they use diluted honey to emphasize their cultural impact on the raw power represented by honey in its original state. Similarly, tobacco is turned into smoke in a ritual to their deity, acknowledging their own cultural power by changing the passive adornment of tobacco in its natural state into a statement of their control of its wispy smoke. Both honey and tobacco mean more than their literal significance as symbols of power and the lack of power among the Botocudo tribes. The words 'honey' and 'tobacco' are linked by the sentences of the tribal rituals to realize an external analogy which leads Livi-Strauss to surmise the internal homology of unconscious religious truths. The importance of translation is especially crucial when Livi-Strauss undertakes the analyses of myths as sign systems in his four-volume series Mythologiques. He maintains that 'the self-identity of sign systems is to be transformable, that is "translatable", into the language of another system with the help of permutations' (1960: 629). Relative to myths, this transformational capacity is especially useful in the composition of a method for dealing with the problem of what appear to be contradictions or non sequiturs on the literal or horizontal axis of individual

74 Roland Α. Champagne stories. Since mythology constitutes a closed or finite sign system, L6vi-Strauss reserves the right to use myths from different temporal and spatial cultures to create a vertical or semantic axis to explain literal non-sense. For example, at the beginning of L'Origine des maniires de table (volume 3 of Mythologiques), Livi-Strauss narrates the Tucuna Indian myth from the Amazon about a wife who is cut in half by her husband and survives by riding on his back. The sense of this myth is explained by comparison with a group of myths from South and North America in which a woman is identified with a frog, providing the semantic clue of linking the words 'sticky' and 'clinging'. When compared to each other, the link of animal to wife in the frog-woman and the clinging wife help to unravel the roles of these enigmatic characters taken separately. The grouping together allows us to understand the physical and moral commentaries of these myths on the nature of wives and women. I will let L6vi-Strauss speak for himself on the significance of this mythical matrix: ...it is wicked and dangerous to confuse physical differences separating animals from humans, or animals from each other. This anticipatory form of racialism would be a threat to social life, which demands, on the contrary, that as human beings, women, whether beautiful or ugly, all deserve to obtain husbands. When contrasted in the mass with animal wives, human wives are all equally valid; but if the armature of the myth is reversed, it cannot but reveal a mysterious fact that society tries to ignore: all human females are not equal, for nothing can prevent them from being different from each other in their animal essence, which means that they are not all equally desirable to prospective husbands. (1978: 76) Such a translation of one myth into another thus ensures for L6vi-Strauss 'the transition from the literal to the figurative meaning...which, beneath the illusion of moral order, discloses the underlying truth of a physical disorder' (1978: 75). Within his method, he is able to move freely between the semantic levels in order to clarify meaning on each level. In other words, the translation moves back and forth among any of the myths within a matrix. Although each myth has its own literal narrative, with its own sequences of events on its horizontal axis, the meaning of the myth, when grouped together on a vertical axis with other myths having analogically similar activities, provides Livi-Strauss with an ethnographic context to clarify the grammar and the semantics of clusters of myths. Within these clus-

Claude L6vi-Strauss 75 ters portrayed on horizontal and vertical axes, Livi-Strauss speaks about the analogy of myth to language on the levels of word and sentence. While the word of a myth is the name of one of its characters within the diagrammatic action of a myth, the sentence of a myth is the meaning attributed to that character within a semantic setting derived from the ethnographic context of a cluster of myths. As a closed system of signs, mythology has certain properties that cannot be translated. L6vi-Strauss insists that myths do not reflect human thinking. As signs, they are replacements for human thought processes. Myths contain their own logic, as they manifest the particular details unique to their ethnological contexts. They do not refer to other sign systems for their meaning. Instead, 'mythology is static: we find the same mythical elements combined over and over again...' (1979:40). This static system has a limited horizon in its literal manifestation. As a scientist, L0vi-Strauss exhausts the structures of this finite system of signs. One of the assumptions in his analyses is that there is a thinking process 'taking place in the myths, in their reflection upon themselves and their interrelation' (1969: 12). Once again, his Kantian inspiration is demonstrated in the internal or organic harmony attributed to myths as self-contained sign systems. In order to be able to translate that harmony, L6vi-Strauss uses the ethnological context to limit the semantic parameters within which a given group of myths elaborates its network of meanings. He speaks of this ethnological context as a totalizing, as opposed to a dialectical, logic. By totalizing he means that the whole system of meaning must be understood in order to appreciate the choices as to which word or name should be placed within a given myth. For the ethnologist, this involves doing 'homework' about the botany, zoology, geography, dietary laws, and other unique characteristics of each culture. Livi-Strauss stipulates that 'if you don't understand everything, you don't explain anything' (1979: 17). However, once this ethnological context is reconstructed, the ethnologist is capable of making connections among some myths, grouping them together, and creating a vertical axis to align their structures. These clusters of meaning can then be translated into language so that the peoples of various cultures are better able to understand and to feel the power of these myths. There still remains those other components of myths which were not aligned on semantic axes. L6vi-Strauss proposed a 'third referent' (1963b: 209) for myths in order to account for the entropy or noise not transposed on binary axes. Others have tried to map these indecidables by using points on a scale. Michel Foucault,

76 Roland Α. Champagne as Gilles Deleuze would have us appreciate him (1988: 22), theorized this third element as a diagonal axis created by combining a series of points on the charts of these myths. For Michel Serres (1968: 38) an asterisk is a more appropriate image, as it radiates away from a center of control or knowledge. However, L6viStrauss offers yet another means of escaping the binary trap—music. Music offers a whole sign system to explain what seems to slip away from the words of a language system. Catherine C16ment, a student of L6vi-Strauss, points to the attractiveness of the musical scale which L£vi-Strauss called 'chromaticism' in Le cru et le cuit by analogy to the world of art with its scale of colors. The chromatic musical scale is composed of half-tones capable of distinguishing fractions of an octave. Thus, for L6vi-Strauss, music offers a range of possibilities by which the indecidables could be self-defined and understood within their own self-identity. C16ment portrays this sign system of music as allowing that 'a structure is constituted from its own distinct space which defines itself in an increasingly sophisticated fashion until it reaches the point of inertia' (1979a: 406). Thus, by introducing the musical model into his translation project, L£vi-Strauss hoped to increase the range within which sign systems could be understood.

Music as the Short-Circuit of Meaning In the first volume of the Mythologiques, Le cru et le cuit, L6vi-Strauss refers to music as a unique system of signs possessing 'its own peculiar vehicle which does not admit of any general, extramusical use' (1969: 18). Yet he also admits that music has levels of structure analogous to the phonemes and sentences of language. The absence of words as the connecting level is an obvious and pertinent fact in the structuring of meaning within music as a sign system. Music thus short-circuits the structure of meaning as it is found functioning in language, from phoneme to word to sentence. From opera, L£vi-Strauss learned to respect the integrity of the rhythm and cadence of music. He applied this integrity of cadence to the meaning of some myths whose semantic density resists translating. A short divergence from L6vi-Strauss for a moment will help us to explain the importance of his insights into music as a sign system. Catherine Cl£ment also studies opera, in which she observes men creating the myth that there is 'in music something feminine that is more than woman, something feminine that will never let itself be penetrated, never be had' (1988: 13). Likewise, Julia Kristeva elabo-

Claude L6vi-Strauss 77 rates a feminist version of this insight into music as a feminine derivative. She describes music as a semiotic form that is pre-verbal and authentic as communication because it simulates the communication without mediation between mother and child in the womb, called the chora (Kristeva 1984: 25-30). It is in the womb that we first learn of the Symbolic, through this communication with our mother. Music is thus a universal, human, and pre-verbal experience allowing access to symbolic communication without the mediation of any cultural messages about language or story-telling. The majority of work by Livi-Strauss was done prior to that by Climent and Kristeva. However, his insights into music as a system of signs are congruent with theirs, and provide the groundwork for their theories about the relationships of words and music as systems of signs culturally and naturally derived. For him, music and mythology participate in extra-linguistic systems of signs realized in time. While studying the convergence of music and mythology, L6vi-Strauss recognized Richard Wagner as 'the undeniable originator of the structural analysis of myths' (1969: 15). Wagner's precedent is of course in opera, where myths are narrated with the accompaniment of musical scores. From Wagner, L6vi-Strauss learned that music is a rarity in being at once intelligible and untranslatable. Whereas L6vi-Strauss once claimed that structure combined form and content in contradistinction to the concentration on form by Propp and other Russian Formalists, he does distinguish between form and content in explaining the interlacing of mythology and music. The form of music can be charted and perhaps understood by its rhythm, produced through an identifiable cadence of silences and sounds. However, its content can only be approximated, not reproduced, by words. Formally, music makes a semantic jump from its discrete quantities (its sounds and silences, which can like phonemes be categorized by + and - to indicate their formal existence within a given context) to its continuous quantities (its scales, series, and other continua of tonal, atonal, or polytonal sounds). That jump is significant because the lacunae are similar to those in the symbolic leap of mythological systems from the literal plane of the narratives. Both systems short-circuit the logical flow of thought. In the isomorphism between music and mythology, the connections of meaning can be made more easily, especially by someone outside the culture within which each is created. Both systems have an incantatory power over their listeners because, as L6vi-Strauss observed, 'just as music makes the individual

78 Roland Α. Champagne conscious of his physiological rootedness, mythology makes him aware of his roots in society' (1969: 28). As these two systems are translated into language so that humanity can discuss their semiotic value, there are also levels of meaning that are not congruent with those of language. There are gaps separating all three systems of signs. Language has three levels of meaning for L6vi-Strauss: phonemes, words, and sentences. By analogy, music must make a semantic jump from phoneme to sentence. And myth is missing the semantic step corresponding to the phonemes in language. The lacunae are different but nevertheless instructive as the three systems of signs are compared within an ethnological context. The three are not interchangeable, and perhaps not even perfectly translatable, because they are merely analogous and not synonymous. Each exists as a system of signs with internal integrity. However, their similar levels allow them to exist side by side, with some possibility for an exchange of information when common codes, isomorphisms, and their contexts make the connections among the levels. L6vi-Strauss presents some of these isomorphisms in his introduction to Le cru et le cuit. The musical overture, for example, sets the mood and the tone for a larger musical composition. Analogously, in myths, the mood, established by the ethnological context, orients the reception of a particular story by consistently being in tune with its grammaticality. In other words, the grammatical mood may be descriptive to indicate cosmological certainty, imperative to impose dogmatic meaning on the sequences of events, or subjunctive to instill fear and uncertainty in the heart of the audience. In addition, the tone creates an emotional ambience wherein emphasis is placed on an individual character, event, or other component of the story. The tone could be ironic, comic, tragic, or interrogatory, and so could influence the way a listener understands the narrative. Thus both music and mythology participate in the mood and tone, those 'relative densities' (1969: 14) which constitute an internal grid to these sign systems. Also common to both systems is the existence of an external grid, similar to the rhythm of music or myth. It is especially with rhythm that L6vi-Strauss is able to isolate music as 'the best suited to throw light on the essence of mythology' (1969: 27). The determination of the speed of either a piece of music or a myth is made by its innate composition according to patterns of unequal length. These patterns were composed to alternate a fast and a slow pace in order to guide the listener through time. By thus controlling a listener's presence in time, both systems keep the listener straddled between immortal time and visceral time. Whereas immortal

Gaude L£vi-Strauss 79 time is an aesthetic question to be resolved along the internal grid, visceral time is physiological and cultural, thus capable of being charted on the external grid of these systems. Throughout the four volumes of his Mythologiques, L6vi-Strauss is very concerned with the external grid because myth is an interface between humanity and its world. Hence, a structural matrix, using the abstract symbols and languages of mathematics, translates his insight that 'myths signify the mind that evolves them by making use of the world of which it is itself a part' (1969: 341). The formal properties of musical notation are also useful in this regard, in that they demonstrate the visual transference of the abstract properties of a sign system. Myths are often narrated to the tune of melodies, chants, choruses, and other forms of musical accompaniment. So the form of music is a common part of the sense of myths in an ethnographic context. Like the operatic composer he wanted to be but never could become (L6vi-Strauss and Eribon 1988: 245-46), L6viStrauss unites music and mythology in his analyses of the structures of myths. The formal properties of myth and music are similar in many respects. He discovered that the fugue and the sonata are mythical in origin, and upon further study noted that at about the time that myths became less attractive to the scientific mind, in the late seventeenth century, 'the great musical styles' (1979: 45) of Western civilization began to appear. For Ldvi-Strauss, this was no accident—the two systems are linked in their history. While myths were often accompanied by song and dance, Western music borrowed the stories of myth and associated them with the mathematical precision of musical notation. Furthermore, in those cultures outside the influence of Western civilization, ritual masks are often associated with both music and myths, especially among the Indian tribes of North and South America. These masks function for L^vi-Strauss as isomorphic statements by these cultures about the ties between the two sign systems: 'music and mythology illustrated by masks are brought into symbolic proximity' (1969: 28). That 'symbolic proximity' is in fact the establishment of the horizons of a semantic axis: sound (music) at one pole and sense (mythology) at the other, with language in the middle ground. Whereas music emphasizes one polar extreme of semantics through its evolution of the phonemic component of meaning, mythology underscores the other pole of meaning as its narratives string together events that are literal examples of daily occurrences in some cultures. Language contains components of both sound and sense, but not in the extreme doses found in the

80 Roland Α. Champagne other two sign systems. L6vi-Strauss finds both music and mythology to be derivative in relation to language insofar as they are 'by-products of a structural shift which had language as a starting point' (1981: 647). He is perhaps too enthusiastic about language here in reducing the other two sign systems to historical spinoffs ('language as a starting point'); he offers no proof for this conjecture. It is probably more instructive to understand the relationship among the three sign systems structurally, along the semantic axis he described, rather than chronologically. The paradigm of an orchestral score provides L£vi-Strauss with a model for the portrayal of mythology as a totality or a system of signs rather than as individual myths narrating only culturally specific stories. The harmony of an orchestra suggests the larger picture of other myths offering variants to construct a semantic grid for a given story. For example, the Bororo myth of the bird-nester is not simply a sequence of events; rather, it is a part of a bundle of events, from which a neighboring G6 tribe derived another myth about the cooking of food. These myths appear to be incompatible at first glance; however, as the events in the myths are bundled into semantic clusters, the structuring of the mythical mind comes into better focus. The bundling of mythical events is similar to serial music, in which other pieces are generated from groupings of sounds in a given pattern, and is analogous to the grouping of types of musical instruments in an orchestra. The orchestral score can maneuver these groupings, but it nevertheless relies on them in order to produce a single totality of effect, a harmonious product. Similarly, L6vi-Strauss performs the function of a musical composer of orchestral scores in his analyses of the logics of myths. He tells us that this performance probably resulted from his frustrations at not being able to compose music himself (1981: 649). In that vein, we see Livi-Strauss imposing the form of music on his analyses of myths, especially in volume 1 of Mythologiques. From the song as a variation on a theme, he develops as models such musical forms as the aria and recitative, the sonata, the rondo, the fugue, the cantata, and the short symphony. These forms are the titles of his analyses, and are not structurally interwoven in the analyses. They appear to be external organizing principles in his pursuit of variations for the semantic bundles found in various myths. Occasionally, there are some insights into the possibilities for working music into the analysis of these bundles of meaning. For example, L6vi-Strauss tells us that Bach used antithesis from myths in his structure of the fugue so that the

Claude Livi-Strauss 81 contrapuntal rhythm of inverting myths because their semantic bundles were in antithetical tension could find a formal model in the alogical movements of the fugue. L6vi-Strauss also observes that generally the listener of music and the audience of myths are struck by the 'continuous reconstruction' (1979: 49) in their structures. However, there is no consistent explanation (in language) as to why the various forms of music are pertinent to the specific variants vi-Strauss considers. In his discussion of the historical replacement of myths by music in Western culture, he speaks of the eminent example of Wagner's The Ring as the model for the blending of music and myth. Here again we return to opera, where the mix is performed ideally. The sounds of music and the meanings of mythology are imbedded in the language of opera. L6vi-Strauss acknowledges that from outside the model of opera he can only imperfectly discuss the interconnections among language, mythology, and music. L6vi-Strauss does think that it is possible to translate these sign systems into schematics the significance of which he can map on a grid. Whereas the semantic axis includes music, language, and mythology on the same plane, there is another axis which goes through language and includes mathematical entities (the internal homology of ethnological sign systems) at one pole and semiological artifacts (external analogies) at the other pole. This axis ranges from the ritual masks, totems, and other physical embodiments of cultural identity, through kinship systems, through language, to the mathematical symbols which portray in the abstract those relationships within sign systems which render almost impossible any effort to translate them into language. The slippery nature of the sign, its arbitrary bond between signifier and signified, which he learned from Saussure (1969: 67), confounds L6vi-Strauss but never totally frustrates him. He employs various models to approximate the communication within sign systems which are apparently closed within themselves. Curiously enough, the mathematical systems endure because of their abstract nature. Since he believes that he can isolate the universal human spirit, the human mind is the constant in all the sign systems he examines. With the use of axes and grids, L6vi-Strauss is intent upon demonstrating the map of this unified humanity. What You See Is Not What You Get L6vi-Strauss claims for ethnology the domain of mythical language, oral signs, gestures, marriage rules, and totemic artifacts. For him, these are semiological

82 Roland Α. Champagne devices not yet analyzed by other disciplines, but appropriate to the ethnological context. Although they appear to be different signs and symbols from separate cultures, he looks beyond their manifest appearances to probe the depths and discover there the latent unity of human communication. L6vi-Strauss yearns to do 'research from the inside' (1963a: 643)—that is, to explore one pole of that axis of human communication traced from 'external analogy to internal homology'. Indeed, most of his research privileges the pole of internal homology: the mathematical language whereby even the most specifically cultural sign system can be explained as part of the universal act of human translation. He uses mathematical symbols in his studies of kinship systems and myths as shorthand in order to chart the structures of the sign systems more readily and to present an overall picture of the structures of these systems for his readers. The overall picture has always interested Livi-Strauss. Once he made it clear that 'for anthropology, which is a conversation between human beings, anything positioned as the intermediary between two objects is symbol and sign' (1960: 631), L6vi-Strauss presented his work as a bridge between anthropology and semiotics. A.J. Greimas reinforced the claim by declaring the viability of 'anthropological semiotics' (1970: 32-33) in studying the pathways of meaning. Meanwhile, L0vi-Strauss continued to probe the appearances of semiological artifacts to understand the nature of the 'intermediary' positions of signs and symbols. In his study of kinship systems (1949), he referred to the avunculate as a key to systems that were neither patrilineal nor matrilineal. Some of his readers accused him of presenting the avunculate as the atom of kinship systems. Despite this unsubstantiated claim for the primacy of the avunculate, Livi-Strauss did make a breakthrough by seeing mediation—the uncle or aunt as an alternative to mother or father in the case of the avunculate—as the most significant characteristic of sign systems in an ethnological context Cultural mediation implements either an exogamous or an endogamous kinship system, such that women are subject to barter as various cultures trade off the productive capacities of their women as the bases for the structure of power in society. Mediation, an intervention in which the problems of translation are controlled by the maneuvering of potentially reticent components of a system, also entails hiding within a cultural context. This hiding effectively instills mystery into society by keeping privileged interests from being manipulated by others as the advent of culture and the birth of the intellect coincided (1963c: 100). It is this act of hiding which L£vi-Strauss uncovered; he insisted throughout his career that

Claude Livi-Strauss 83 latent structures are considerably more important than what is obvious about a culture. By his strategy of unifying form and content in common structures derived from cultures compared to one another, he ultimately resolved problems such as the 'illusion of totemism' (1963c: 102) and demonstrated that cultures do mediate their sign systems by controlling the appearances by which signs and symbols are related. In the controlling of appearances, an important factor is the introduction of 'noise' into sign systems. This 'noise' is ideologically motivated; it precludes the intervention of other cultures into the integrity of a given system by creating apparent disorder which has no semantic place within the context of the system. 'Noise' thus appears to those outside the sign system as a contradiction or paradox not able to be assumed or understood by the 'logic' of another sign system. In his study of ritual masks (1982), L6vi-Strauss encountered this noise as he saw the ceremonial masks used by Indian tribes in the northwest section of North America. Observing that the masks were larger than life and resembled nothing in the neighboring or originating cultures, he was struck by their incompatibility with their religious and social roles and asked: 'Why this unusual shape, so illadapted to their function?' (1982: 12). He solved the puzzle by not allowing himself to be upset by the apparently grotesque deformities of the masks and by examining instead the transformations the masks underwent as they came to embody myths conveying power over the uncertainties of changes in the lives of members of these cultures. For example, the Swaihw6 mask of the island and coastal Salish is adorned with copper hoops found among many of the neighboring tribes. The mask also has unique power to cure convulsions, ensure incest-free marriages, and dispense riches. All three of these disparate powers are attributed to the mask because its copper or metal components portray the dangerous hoop, found in myths of the tribes as a means of defeating adversaries. Once again, L6vi-Strauss demonstrated that, by creating bridges among the sign systems of a given ethnological context, semantic ties can be established to reduce the entropy of a single sign system which appears to be enigmatic if left to the integrity of its own internal coherence. The ethnological context thus proves to be valuable in collecting what L6viStrauss calls 'the concordance of the cosmic code and the sociological code' (1982: 224) from the various sign systems devised by a culture to translate the unique and also common vision of its people and their relationship to their world.

84 Roland Α. Champagne The concordance provided by an ethnological context allows us to make connections where there appear to be no seams in the sign systems. The incest taboo, for example, appeared to be an indigenous prohibition common to the kinship systems of northwest American Indian tribes. However, once their systems of economic exchange, potlatch, and the avunculate are compared for their reification of women as items of barter, the incest taboo can be better understood as a way of controlling the reproductive activity of the woman so that she might appreciate in value as a commodity to be traded within the guise of these other systems. Whereas the unity achieved by an ethnological context may give the sense of a unity of vision for a given culture (or even for the universal human spirit, idealized yet never realized by Livi-Strauss), in fact the concordance leads to an awareness of the complex ties involved in translating the sign systems of a culture. Ironically, his goal for the human sciences was realized in a way he had not foreseen when he said that 'the final goal of the human sciences is not to constitute humanity but to dissolve it' (1962: 326). Although he sought a unified 'human spirit' in his pursuit of the concordances among languages, myths, music, and other semiological artifacts, his work demonstrates semiotics as translation and remains as a testimony to the plurality of human sign systems and the human spirits that invade them through the mediation of human cultures.

The Dynamics of Human Tolerance Through the application of various horizontal, vertical, and transverse axes, L6viStrauss analyzes sign systems in a geometrical manner inspired by Roman Jakobson's model of the poetic grid. The geometrical result is a spatial diagram of the intersections of human sign-systems. Indeed, space preoccupied Livi-Strauss in his proposal of the ethnological context. Semiotics is thus reduced to a spatial schematic of translation as the art of intersection. L6vi-Strauss has the most success where the largest number of intersecting axes meet. From this intersection, he can follow another axis and glean along it insights from the semantics of a different sign system in the same ethnological context. He then applies Peirce's definition of the sign as the replacement of something for someone. L£vi-Strauss inserts the newly learned meaning for what seemed to be noise in the environment of the primary sign system, and thus expands his analysis of the semantic horizons of that system.

Claude Livi-Strauss 85 As he expands the semantic horizon of a sign system, Livi-Strauss exhibits the 'dynamic tolerance' he once advocated to relieve the threat of monocultural hegemony (1952). He respects the integrity of each culture as he substitutes meanings gathered from other sign systems in the same cultural context. Rather than radicalize a culture's sign system with his discoveries from the language model, as he did early in his career with the reading of 'Les Chats' and the Oedipus myth, he has learned to respect the differences innate in each sign system and to examine the relationships and transformations performed upon the meaning transferred from another system. Myth is often the location for intersecting axes, because L6vi-Strauss portrays myth as a logical instrument by which cultures think through certain contradictions. The characters of myths are often the embodiment of the contradictions found throughout the sign systems of a cultural context. Within an ethnological context, cultures and myths translate their own visions of the cosmos and the relationships of their peoples to this cosmos. The problem of translation, with its treacheries and noises, thus led L6vi-Strauss to the resolution of his own enigma of monocultural hegemony. While in the realm of attempting to translate our differences to each other, we can also participate in the dynamics of human tolerance as we try to Find more avenues by which to gain better access to the noises inherent in our cultures. Claude L6vi-Strauss has led the way with his semiotics of ethnological context, in which translation is a model for improving the mutual understanding of cultural differences.

References C16ment, Catherine 1979a Le lieu de la musique. In Claude Levi-Strauss, Raymond Bellour and Catherine Climent (eds.), 395-423. Paris: Gallimard. 1979b L' Opera ou la defaite des femmes. Paris: Grasset and Fasquelle. 1988 Opera or the Undoing of Women, trans, by Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988.) Deleuze, Gilles 1988 Foucault, trans, by Sean Hand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

86 Roland Α. Champagne Detienne, Marcel 1979 Dionysos Slain, trans, by Mireille and Leonard Muellner. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gallop, Jane 1982 The Daughter's Seduction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Greimas, AJ. 1970 Du Sens. Paris: Larousse. (Trans, by Paul J. Perron and Frank H. Collins as On Meaning. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.) Jakobson, Roman 1960 Linguistics and poetics. In Style in Language, Thomas A. Sebeok (ed.), 350-77. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Jakobson, Roman and L6vi-Strauss, Claude 1962a 'Les Chats' de Charles Baudelaire. VHomme 2, 5-21. (Trans, by F.M. DeGeorge in The Structuralists from Marx to Livi-Strauss. New York: Anchor, 1972.) Kristeva, Julia 1984 Revolution in Poetic Language, trans, by Margaret Waller. New York: Columbia University Press. L6vi-Strauss, Claude 1945 L'Analyse structurale en linguistique et en anthropologic. Word: Journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York 1, 47-48. (Trans, by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Gundfest Schoepf as 'Structural analysis in linguistics and anthropology', in Structural Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1963, pp. 31-54.) 1949 Les structures elementaires de la parente. Paris: Presses Universitäres de France. (Trans, by James Harle Beiland John R. von Sturner as The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Boston: Beacon Press, 1969.) 1952 Race and History. New York: UNESCO. 1958 La geste d'Asdiwal. In Annuaires de l'Ecole pratique des hautes itudes. Paris: Presses Universitäres de France. 1960 L'anthropologie sociale devant l'histoire. Annates 15 (4), 625-37. 1962 La pensee sauvage. Paris: Plön. (Trans, as The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.) 1963a R6ponses ä quelques questions. Esprit 21 (322), 628-53.

Claude L6vi-Strauss 87 1963b The structural study of myth. In Structural Anthropology, trans, by C. Jacobson and B.G. Schoepf, 202-228. New York: Basic Books. 1963c Totemism, trans, by Rodney Needham. Boston: Beacon Prsss. 1965 Le triangle culinaire. L'Arc 26,19-29. 1967 The Scope of Anthropology, trans, by Sherry and Robert Paul. London: Jonathan Cape. 1969 The Raw and the Cooked. Mythologiques, vol. 1, trans, by John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row. 1976 The story of Asdiwal. In Structural Anthropology II, trans, by N. Mann, 146-97. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1978 The Origin of Table Manners. Mythologiques, vol. 3, trans, by John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row. 1979 Myth and Meaning (from the CBC Radio series 'Ideas', broadcast in December 1977). New York: Shocken Books. 1981 The Naked Man. Mythologiques, vol. 4, trans, by John and Doreen Weightman. New York: Harper and Row. 1982 The Way of the Masks, trans, by Sylvia Modelski. Seattle: University of Washington Press. 1987a Anthropology & Myth, trans, by Roy Willis. London: Blackwell. 1987b Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, trans, by Felicity Baker. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. 1988 The Jealous Potter, trans, by Benedicte Chorier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Levi-Strauss, Claude and Eribon, Didier 1988 De pris et de loin. Paris: Odile Jacob. Marc-Lipiansky, Mireille 1973 Le structuralisme de Levi-Strauss. Paris: Payot. Mauss, Marcel 1924 Essai sur le don. L'Annee Sociologique 1 (2), 30-186. (Trans, by I. Cunnison as The Gift. London: Cohen and West, 1954.) Propp, Vladimir 1968 Morphology of the Folktale, trans, by Laurence Scott. Austin: University of Texas Press, the American Folklore Society, and the Indiana University Research Center for Language Sciences. Ricoeur, Paul 1963 Structure et hermöneutique. Esprit 31 (November), 596-627.

88 Roland Α. Champagne Riffaterre, Michael 1970

Describing poetic structures: Two approaches to Baudelaire's 'Les Chats'. In Structuralism, Jacques Ehrmann (ed.), 188-229. New York: Anchor. 1978 Semiotics of Poetry. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Saussure, Ferdinand de 1969 Course in General Linguistics, trans, by Wade Baskin. New York: McGraw-Hill. Serres, Michel 1968 Le messager. Bulletin de la Societe frangaise de Philosophie 63,3-69. Trubetzkoy, Nicolai 1949 Principes de phonologie, trans, by J. Cantineau. Paris: Klincksieck. (English translation by Christine Baltaxe, Principles of Phonology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.)

Roland A. Champagne (b.1946) is Professor of French at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. His research interests include twentieth-century literary theory, philosophy, and creative fiction. Among his publications are Beyond the Structuralist Myth of Ecriture (1977), Literary History in the Wake of Roland Barthes (1984), and Claude Levi-Strauss (1987). Address: 324 E. Rosewood Avenue, San Antonio, TX 78212.

The Semiotics of Luis Jorge Prieto Jeanne Martinet

Luis Jorge Prieto, the Man Luis Jorge Prieto was born in 1926, in Buenos Aires. His father hailed from Zamora, Spain. His mother was of Italian descent, her family stemming from Genoa. When Luis was eight, the Prietos left for Bahia Bianca, an important naval base where the father served as a petty officer. Some years later, they moved north, to Cördoba and a milder climate. Luis's delicate health may have been one of the factors which determined the choice of the new residence. His health also made regular school attendance a problem, and his education was therefore entrusted to tutors. One of them, Carlos Alberto Väzquez, made a deep impression on him: 'He was the one who taught me to think'. Luis eventually entered the University of Cördoba, where he concentrated on classical languages and what was then known as comparative philology. He obtained his first degree in 1952, and his doctorate in 19SS, with a dissertation on Spanish phonology. By that time, Prieto had established contacts with Andr6 Martinet, who taught then at Columbia University; in 1954, he published the article which marked the beginning of his scientific career, 'Traits oppositionnels et traits contrastifs', in Word, the journal of the Linguistic Circle of New York. In 1956, Prieto was granted a scholarship for study in France by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs; from 1957 until 1960, he was a research fellow of the French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. From then on very active, he wrote many important contributions, the publication of which was often delayed for various reasons—one of them being the startling originality of his approach: what was to appear in 1964 as Principes de noologie was presented by Martinet as a memoir at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, and was rejected by a jury presided over by Emile Benveniste. In 1960, Prieto returned to Cördoba as a professor of general linguistics, and the following year, he was appointed research fellow by the Argentinian National Council of Scientific Investigation. As a consequence of a military coup, in 1966

90 Jeanne Martinet he was deprived of both his chair and his fellowship. He spent a year as a private tutor in Buenos Aires, where he made useful contacts with psychoanalysts.

Plate 1. Luis Jorge Prieto In 1967, he received an invitation from the University of Algiers. He stayed there two years, teaching general linguistics. In 1969, the University of Vincennes, created as a result of the division of the University of Paris into thir-

Luis Jorge Prieto 91 teen distinct seats of learning, offered him a position as an Associate Professor of Semiology. But at about the same time, at the suggestion of Andr6 Martinet, the University of Geneva appointed him Full Professor of General Linguistics in the chair left vacant by the retirement of Henri Frei—the same chair in which Ferdinand de Saussure had, more than sixty years before, given the three courses that made him famous. For two years, Prieto commuted from Paris to Switzerland; then in 1972 he resigned from his Paris job and moved to Geneva. In 1973, during a short democratic spell in Argentina, Prieto was offered a Chair of Semiology in Buenos Aires. He spent two summer months there and was planning his return when the political situation deteriorated again and he gave up once more. Prieto now makes his permanent residence in Geneva. He has been active as a contributor to (and for a while an editor of) the renowned journal Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure. He is entertaining fruitful and permanent contacts with a number of Italian scholars, and the original version of his latest book is entitled Saggi di semiotica.

The Semiotics of Luis J . Prieto The Saussurean Tradition Luis J. Prieto is both a linguist and a semiotician. He views a language as a semiotic structure, and linguistic facts hold a central place in his theoretical thinking. His first scientific contributions deal with linguistics, but they offer the keys to his approach to semiotics, and therefore cannot be sidestepped by anyone attempting to penetrate his scientific universe. Prieto belongs to the Saussurean tradition prevalent among European linguists and semiologists. Among them, Andrd Martinet was the one from whose teaching he started. But, as we shall see, this never entailed blind adherence to his master's views; from his first steps, his scientific productions bear the mark of a personal slant. In the Saussurean tradition, a sign (a linguistic sign) is a bifacial entity consisting in the indissoluble union of a signifiant (signifier) and a signifii (signified), linked by an arbitrary (i.e., conventional) bond. Saussure himself never specified the size of the sign: it could be a sentence, a phrase, a word, or a minimal significant unit, although his illustrations are normally words. The readers of Prieto's

92 Jeanne Martinet early writings are to be warned that by sign he normally means a sentence. The two planes of the signifies (content) and the signifiants (expression) are, in each language (langue), divided into articuli, each with a signifii and a signifiant. Hjelmslev chose to operate with two isomorphic planes, whereas Martinet preferred to oppose a first articulation into significant units to a second one into distinctive units. Saussure's emphasis on differences led to the notion of relevance (in French, pertinence) proposed by Karl Bühler and established by Martinet as the basis for a functional analysis of language. Linguistic relevance is revealed by the commutation test, which requires bringing together different minimally distinct language segments. Thus linguistic units that can appear in identical contexts are found to stand in opposition to one another. The notion of contrast is reserved for the relations between units coexisting in the same utterance. The distinction between opposition and contrast is precisely where Prieto starts.

Opposition vs. Contrast In his second article, 'Traits oppositionnels et traits contrastifs', published in 1954, Prieto takes his distance from his predecessors by stating that 'phonology had dealt with paradigmatic units while leaving aside the determination and study of syntagmatic units in spite of the narrow relations that exist between the former and the latter'. He then applies himself to the examination and treatment of those relations, a matter that will retain his attention throughout his career.

Compounds and Components Another very central preoccupation of Prieto's is the identification and characterization of units conceived as separate objects distinct in space and time. The distinction between compound objects and components recurs in his writings (cf. 1975a: 26, 147, 150; 1975b: 84; 1988). Accordingly, distinctive features cannot be identified as objects, and the phoneme is not a compound object, but a component of such compound objects as syllables, the syllable in its turn being a component of the word, and so on up to the sentence. The basis for the determi-

Luis Jorge Prieto 93 nation of syntagmatic units is to be found in prosody. The phoneme is presented not as distinctive, but as a unit of identification (1964: 99 n. 18).

Noology When he approaches the plane of content, in his Principes de noologie (published in 1964, but conceived in the late 1950s), Prieto stresses the necessity of dealing with content regardless of expression, just as phonology deals with expression regardless of content. This implies that he will start from the sentence, the only autonomous unit of discourse (note that Spanish oraciön stands for both 'sentence' and 'discourse'). Generally speaking, his approach is the commutative operation through which a sentence is broken up into features of meaning. But features, which cannot be identified as spatio-temporal objects, cannot be units. The minimal content unit, the noeme, is a set of features, the presence of one of which conditions the presence of the others. Prieto's analysis into noemes tallies neither with that into the morphemes of the Bloomfieldians or the moneme of the functionalists, nor with the 'words' of spelling. An important deviation from both tradition and usual contemporary analysis is Prieto's inclusion, among the features of the noeme, of the grammatical function assumed in the specific context, so that, for instance, 'book' as a subject will not be the same noeme as 'book' as an object Notice that such features as 'subject' and 'object' appear between parentheses, and are thereby marked as 'contrastive', which points to the fact that they do not alternate, but coexist in the sentence.

Characteristics and Dimensions In the 1975 postface to his Word article (1975a: 26), Prieto states that in each feature (or, from then on, each characteristic) there are always a contrastive constituent and an oppositional one: when we characterize a window, one of its characteristics will not be '3 feet', but '(width) 3 feet'. This induces him to replace 'contrastive element' with 'dimension', and extend it to cases where space is not implied—as for example to 'color', in '(color) red'. Since Prieto's units necessarily occupy relative positions in the sentence, the study of their contrastive characteristics will correspond to the syntax (1988). It

94 Jeanne Martinet should be clear that syntactic relations are not restricted to the plane of content, but extend as well to that of expression, where we find that each unit is characterized by its 'dimensions' between parentheses, each one of them followed by its oppositional features. On the noetic plane, we find, for each unit, a contrastive pattern made up of the set of contrastive elements, or dimensions, which characterize all the units liable to have the same syntactic comportment. Reverting to our former illustration, the window, its contrastive pattern would include not only 'width', but also 'height', 'nature of the frame', and so forth. In the same way, each expressive unit will present a contrastive pattern which will mark its role in the syntax of phonology. The contrastive pattern of, say, French [2] consists of (1) (localization), (2) (labialization), (3) (aperture), and (4) (nasalization), the oppositional characteristics being 'front' for (1), 'minus' for (2), 'medium' for (3), and 'plus* for (4). It is worth mentioning that contrastive patterns do not necessarily include syntactic dimensions. The dimensions for the verb, for instance—namely, 'information', 'injunction', and 'question' on the one hand, and 'assertion' and 'negation' on the other—are non-syntactic, because, with respect to each of them, there are no objects to which one could refer: if we consider the sentence 'The man lost the book', we find that 'to lose' does not constitute an object in extra-linguistic reality. A consequence of Prieto's concentration on dimensions (i.e., contrastive values) is the vindication of prosody, which thereby ceases to figure, in the description, as a kind of annex to the study of segmental phonemes, becoming rather the framework in which they are ordered.

The Two Levels of Meaning

On the plane of content, we are concerned with meaning—first and foremost, for Prieto, the meaning of the sentence. Meaning, for him, is some knowledge that the emitter endeavors to transmit or communicate to the receiver, so that it become knowledge for the latter. Now, meaning is identified by both emitter and receiver on two levels: (1) the level of 'intercomprehension', and (2) the linguistic level. The former includes the latter (i.e., whatever knowledge is implied in the language signal). But it contributes to it additional relevant information that can be derived from the circumstances and is shared by both participants. If there is a choice

Luis Jorge Prieto 95 between red wine and white wine, the emitter may indicate his preference by using the phrase 'red wine*. But if the situation makes clear that wine is at issue, 'red' may suffice. When we consider a given act of speech, it should be clear that what is signified on the linguistic level will depend on what is implied on the level of intercomprehension. Prieto designates as 'connotative' the identity of the linguistic meaning on the ground that it presupposes that of intercomprehension. He is (1975b: 68) perfectly aware of his departure in this regard from what is usually implied by connotation. All of this, however, does not prevent him from reminding us that, if we look at the general conditioning of human communication, each language imposes its patterns for the shaping of meaning on the level of intercomprehension. As we have seen before, Prieto wants to operate with objects. Meaning, for him, being a knowledge (i.e., an object of thought), cannot be a compound object Consequently, its constituents cannot be objects. They are referents (1988: section 13) conceived as the oppositional elements of a characteristic (= feature of meaning): in 'the man lost a book', 'book' presents the syntactic dimension 'direct object' and the oppositional element 'book', which refers to an object with a definite identity. All of this goes far beyond Ogden and Richards's famous and (from Prieto's standpoint) most unfortunate triangle.

Syntax and Semantics

From what was said above about syntax, it should be clear that contrastive patterns include meaning as well as syntax, so that these two should not be treated separately. Prieto briefly indicates where he stands as regards Tesnifere's and Chomsky's conception of syntax. He firmly rejects the notion that syntax should be the study of the relations between the elements of the utterance. His agreement, in such matters, with the conclusions of logic is certainly not fortuitous. The delimitation of the domain of syntax should not rest upon a distinction between 'form' and 'substance', but, within substance, between what a cognitive construction shows to be universal and what appears to be non-universal and therefore distinctive. To syntax belongs what is universal in the cognitive construction of meaning; to semantics, what is distinctive. But the study of what is universal being inseparable from the study of what is distinctive, syntax and semantics should not be made separate chapters of linguistics: just as phonology studies the

96 Jeanne Martinet speaker's cognitive construction of the sounds, semantics should study his cognitive construction of meaning. The Semic Act Prieto's best known contribution is probably the one dealing with the semic act (or act of communication) (1966:1.1), a special case of which is the act of speech. In fact, the act of speech was studied first by Saussure, and served as a model for Eric Buyssens's semic act (1943), which secured a foundation for functional semiotic thinking. We find, in Prieto's writing, several presentations of both the semic act and the act of speech with practically the same diagram, the latter appearing first in Principes de noologie (1964:100). It reads as follows. An emitter, E, (variously designated as sujet, or sujet parlant) intends to transmit some knowledge to a receiver, R, so that it will become R's knowledge too. This knowledge is a meaning (1968, written long before) or a message (1966). This meaning, a concrete reality, appears as a variant of a class of meanings, offered by the particular language made use of. Such a class, an abstract reality, is a signified (signifii). With each signified is associated a signifier (signifiant), another abstract reality, which is a class of signals. The signal is the concrete tool produced by Ε for carrying the message. In the case of the act of speech, that tool is sounds. Now, when R receives the concrete signal, he identifies it as belonging to the signifier (abstract) class, which gives him access to the associated signified (abstract) class, and he eventually gathers the (concrete) meaning involved in the particular act of speech with the help of whatever information is supplied by the situation. There are two reverse processes: E's proceeding from meaning to sounds through signified and signifier, and R's from sounds to meaning through signifier and signified. In each process, there are two stages: one from concrete to abstract, the other from abstract to concrete. The basic communicative entity consisting in the indissoluble association of a signified and a signifier is the seme (a term coined by Buyssens [1943]) and, for language, the sentence (see Figure 1). The Shape of Meaning Such acts are cognitive acts. What is transmitted, and shared, is knowledge. Knowledge proceeds through the establishment of classes, and the distribution

Luis Jorge Prieto 97 among those classes of the portions of reality that constitute objects. Such classes, defined by means of characteristics (i.e., in comprehension) are concepts, and knowledge is the 'conceptual apprehension* of reality. As Prieto points out (1975b: 88), 'a characteristic of an object can be manifest only in the aisthesis of the portion of reality which constitutes that object, i.e., in the set of physiological modifications it produces upon the subject's sensorial organs'. Emitter

•

-Receiver-

Fig. 1. The semic act (Prieto 1969, 1975a)

The Instrumental Act It should never be forgotten that knowledge can be acquired and concepts can be shaped other than by semiotic and linguistic activities—namely, by 'instrumental acts'. In an instrumental act, a subject (which we shall designate an operator) performs a given operation, by means of a tool, with the aim of producing some result or thing. The utility of the tool designates the class of operations that can be accomplished by means of it. The class of tools by means of which the operation can be accomplished is the device (my translation of Prieto's operant, made on the model of signifiant 'signifier', an unfortunate choice). Utility and device are the two faces of the instrument, just as signified and signifier are those of the seme. On the model of Prieto's Figure 1 for the semic act and act of speech, we can schematize the instrumental act by means of Figure 2, the differ-

98 Jeanne Martinet ence from Figure 1 being that we do not indicate any feedback, since we are dealing here with knowledge acquisition and not communication. Operator operation

utility -INSTRUMENTdevice

tool

Fig. 2. The instrumental act A comparison of the two diagrams reminds us of the importance Prieto attaches to the devising of tools in the evolution of mankind (1966: Preface). Can we not say that a signal is a tool devised for the communication of information? Whether other beings than man resort to signals for that purpose is not our concern here. A speaker is an operator whose aim is communicating his knowledge. His instrument will be a seme, the operation will consist in a message or meaning, and the parallelism will follow through utility and signified, device and signifier, tool and signal. From the emitter's standpoint, a semic act would be just a particular case of the instrumental act. What we would like to stress as capital in the instrumental act is the repetition of the same operation by means of the same tools, the same gestures, reminding us of the vocal gestures of speech tending toward the same aim—i.e., the emergence and delimitation of concepts and, generally, the 'conceptual apprehension of reality' and the accumulation of knowledge, regardless of any reference to a particular language. All of this invalidates Roland Barthes's contention that the universe of signs is nothing but that of language ('il n'y a de sens que ηοπιτηέ et le monde des signifies n'est autre que celui du langage'— Barthes 1964).

The Seme The tool used in order to perform the semic act, the seme—a bifacial entity— carries two pieces of information. The first, the emitter's intention to transmit a

Luis Jorge Prieto 99 message to a receiver, will be labeled the notificative indication. This aspect does not hold Prieto's attention very long. The second, the content of the message, is the significative indication—i.e., the message itself (1966: sections 1.3, III. 10, IV.l). Prieto submits to a thorough examination the conditions of the success or failure of the semic act, thereby considering not only the seme itself but whatever in the circumstances and the behavior of the participants may play a role.

Economy and Articulation Prieto deals at some length with the economy of communication (73 pages in Prieto 1966). The seme is then approached, no longer in its relations to the whole of the semic act, but within the code to which it belongs, in comparison with the semes of the same code. In this study, Prieto in fact operates with the model supplied by Martinet's theory of the double articulation, but he resorts to a heavy logical apparatus with the aim of splitting the two faces of the sign into members of classes called 'factors'. After Martinet (e.g., 1939), he points to the economy achieved when, for example, a single system of 100 classes is broken up into two systems of 10 classes, each item appearing as made up of two constituents (for instance, tens and units). Such a separation of the two faces of the seme is called an articulation. In a first articulation, the seme is broken up into signs through a single division of the two faces of the seme. This is illustrated by reference to a system combining military ranks and arms (1968: 123). In a second articulation, the signifier alone is articulated into entities called figures that appear in other signifiers. Note that it is immaterial whether or not there has been a first articulation. An illustration of the second articulation is afforded by the numbering of the bus lines of a city, where for instance the seme 123 can be analyzed into digits, the position of each of which is sufficient to distinguish one line from another. Note that this is valid for the public at large, while communication engineers often attribute a meaning to the digits of bus line numbers. The double articulation pattern offers a handy basis for a typology of codes, with four types: Type I. Codes with no articulations: for instance, traffic lights where a seme /red/ 'stop' cannot be analyzed into signs, nor its signifier into figures.

100 Jeanne Martinet Type 2. Codes with first articulation only: for instance, mathematical notation, analyzable into signs whose signifiers—2, 4, —cannot be split up into figures. Type 3. Codes with second articulation only: for instance, the abovementioned bus line illustration, where the signifiers are analyzed into figures, but semes cannot be analyzed into signs. Type 4. Codes with a double articulation, with semes articulated into signs and signifiers into figures. This is the case with natural languages, and, so far, double articulation is what differentiates them from other codes. For Prieto, they are the only codes where the signified entertain relations of inclusion and intersection. Double Pertinence and Connotation The cognitive act—instrumental, semiotic, or linguistic—is always at the back of Prieto's mind, whatever the matter he is dealing with. It is the case, for instance, with the above-mentioned distinction between the system of intercomprehension and the linguistic system. The two levels must of course be reckoned with for the semiotic act as well as for the act of speech. This means that the system of intercomprehension includes non-semiotic as well as semiotic information: a traffic signal means something only when located at a certain place and noticed by a given subject, driver or pedestrian, who adapts his or her behavior to the whole situation, including that of other drivers or pedestrians, weather and road conditions, and so forth. All of this belongs to the system of intercomprehension. On the plane of the semiotic system, the signified of that same signal is identified by reference to the other traffic signals. We see how the meaning is on the one hand an extra-semiotic entity, and on the other hand a semiotic one. Language is, of course, just a particular case. As regards the signal, there is a single level of relevancy to be taken into consideration—that of the signifier, which makes the signal a semiotic entity and nothing else. In other words, on the plane of content, there are two different classifications of the meaning (or message). On that of expression, there is only one, that of the signal. Similarly, an operation performed in order to achieve an aim is conceived twice by the operator (1975b: 63): once in reference to the class represented by the utility of the tool made use of (e.g., 'hammering'); but, before that, in reference to another class which would seem to be the achievement of a definite aim (e.g., 'hanging a picture'), a specific action

Luis Jorge Prieto 101 conceived as belonging to a certain class ('picture hanging')· The tool, like the signal, is conceived only once, in reference to the device. This classification on two levels—that of intercomprehension and that of the signified, or in the case of the semic act and the act of speech, that of the aim and that of utility for the instrumental act—constitutes the 'double pertinence' on which Prieto founds his theory of connotation (1975a: 169-70). A 'connotative' conception of something implies that there is another way of conceiving it, but that the latter does not imply the former. That latter is 'denotative', or rather, 'notative' (1975b: 67). Connotation would somehow be 'subsidiary' in regard to another conception of the thing; it would not exist without that other conception. Connotation could not apply to something different from what (de)notation applies to. It always refers to what is (de)noted. We have to remember that, for Prieto, the classification of a meaning in regard to the system of intercomprehension (or of an operation in regard to the class that determines it) logically precedes its classification in regard to the semiotic or linguistic system (or to the utility of the instrument). If we do, we understand that what is (de)notative is the conception of the meaning (or the operation) derived from the system of intercomprehension (or the class that determines the operation), and what is connotative is the conception derived from the semiotic or linguistic system (or the utility of the instrument). If, in a given situation—the basis of intercomprehension—I use the pronoun 'it' in reference to 'wine', wine is thereby connoted. But if I say 'wine', wine is (de)noted. Art and Style

Double pertinence and connotation afford the basis of Prieto's approach to art and style. Every instrument is endowed with a utility, so that making use of an instrument always implies a connotative conception of the operation performed by means of it. Every human action, which is always conceived by Prieto as a cognitive process, is also, as it were, an instrumental act. Therefore, the 'subsidiary' manner of conceiving a thing, which characterizes connotation, is present in any human action. Accordingly, connotation is a phenomenon which accompanies any human activity (1975b: 63). This phenomenon differs from what Barthes called the 'universal semantization of uses', according to which such utilitarian, functional things as clothes (used for protection) and food (used for nourishment) are also used to mean, so that 'any use

102 Jeanne Martinet is converted into a sign of that use* (1975b: 69-70). For Prieto, such a 'semantization' constitutes a kind of 'functionalization' of connotations: if it is possible to use different instruments to execute an operation with the same result, each of these will be functionally 'neutral' regarding the execution itself, but will carry its own connotations and be valued differently. Thus another function will be fulfilled—for instance, that of characterizing a group within society. The phenomenon called 'art' should be connected with the functionalization of connotations. Prieto puts forward the hypothesis that art is 'characterized by the deliberate use of a certain instrument by the operator in order to indicate the connotative conception of the operation resulting from that use' (1975b: 72). Such a use of an instrument with the express purpose of indicating something belongs to the field of communication. This leads him to distinguish between two fundamentally different forms of art: art always results from the execution of an operation, but that operation may or may not be communicative; consequently, the tool used in the process—i.e., the work of art—may or may not be a signal. Therefore, a work of art which is always communicative on the connotative level may also be communicative on the (de)notative one, that of the basic operation. Art is properly what connotes. Prieto distinguishes between 'literary arts', which rest upon a communicative basis (including the figurative plastic arts, cinema, theatre, and comic strips), and the 'architectural arts', which have no communicative basis. (These would, besides architecture itself, include design.) In both cases, the 'artistic content' is reached only when the receiver has been able to gather what the signal was meant to convey (literary arts) or what the tool was meant to achieve (architectural arts) (1975b: 72). A third form of art is dubbed 'musical arts', which include, besides music itself, dance and non-figurative plastic arts (1975b: 72). In this case, the basic operation is less evident. As the basis of the musical phenomenon, there might be a communicative operation which would concern not some objective reality, as in the case of 'literary arts', but a subjective one (1975b: 73, 1975a: 122). (For the identity of the work of art, see Prieto 1987.) The problem of connotation is linked with that of style. Style occurs when an operator is given a choice between several possible means of executing an operation. The means chosen constitute the style of the operation. Every aspect of the operation which entails a choice constitutes a dimension of style, which makes of style a network of dimensions. When the operation is a semic act, two indications are supplied: a denotative one which corresponds to the bare contents of the

Luis Jorge Prieto 103 message; and another one which is the style and results from the manner in which the denotation is supplied. This is connotation. Style may appear as indices or as signals. We find here a basic distinction made by all functionalists after Eric Buyssens. In a literary work, style is always signal. We cannot enter here into Prieto's detailed examination of the different levels of choice and style production. We shall simply quote his conclusion (1975a: 114): Substance and form do not belong the former to the plane of contents, the latter to the plane of expression. They stand both on the plane of contents. Besides, the main channel for communicating the esthetic contents of the work is neither the substance by itself, nor the form by itself, but their relation, a relation between an individual and a class, therefore a relation between concrete and abstract.

Luis J. Prieto's Contribution to Research:

An Assessment

Semiotics and Linguistics What strikes us when we look at Prieto's bibliography is the fact that, among his major works, the one that has enjoyed the widest diffusion is Messages et signaux, translated, so far, into seven languages. Its Italian version is presented as Lineamenti di semiologia. The original title itself, 'Messages and Signals', leaves no doubt about the semiotic nature of its contents. Yet, at the same time, it is the work that stands closest to his original functional linguistic inspiration. The double articulation pattern, from which he had stood aloof in his Principes de noologie, is here undoubtedly the underlying pattern. It is therefore clear that his lasting contribution to research participates in the two disciplines of linguistics and semiotics, and it might not be easy to ascribe each of his contributions to one or the other.

Static or Dynamic? Actually, Prieto's interest is focused not on languages (les langues) as so many distinct instruments of communication, which they are, but on language in general

104 Jeanne Martinet (le langage, or better still, la langue) conceived as one and the same object. This man who for decades has had to make constant use of three languages does not seem ever to have been tempted to contrast them. The three of them being Romance languages has certainly made it easier for him to disregard their structural differences—the more so because what really counts for him is the written version of language, notwithstanding his recurring references to phonology. He takes exception to Martinet's (1960: sections 1-14) definition of a language on account of the inclusion in it of 'vocal nature'. Here again, his reaction coincides with that of Hjelmslev. Both scholars remain faithful to a static vision of language which blurs for them the fact that the structure of language can only be understood if we keep in mind the inescapable linearity of speech. But, of course, the choice of a language as the object to be defined would have sufficed to arouse Prieto's suspicion.

No Access to Description All of this accounts for the relative lack of response to Prieto's approach to linguistics proper. In these matters, the noological venture, one of Prieto's most original bids, reminds one of Hjelmslev's glossematic attempt We find in both the decision to abide by Saussure's pronouncement regarding the equal status of signifid and signifiant, leading to an isomorphic treatment of the two planes of content and expression. Prieto's treatment here is somewhat more elaborate than that of his Danish predecessor; yet it remains, just like Hjelmslev's, on a strictly theoretical level, with rare and inconclusive illustrations. Knud Togeby's (1951) attempt to apply the essentials of glossematics to the description of a language (French) proved a failure, and no one has tried it again. So far we are lacking even a sketchy presentation of the noological pattern of a language. Had Prieto's teaching in such matters been more explicit—had he, for instance, made perfectly clear what the successive noemes of an utterance are—he might have won followers. In the 1960s, most structuralists were tempted for a while to posit the word as the significant counterpart of the phoneme. This would have entailed declaring irrelevant the successivity of the elements in 'of the roses', and equating it with its Latin equivalent rosarum, where no one can tell where 'rose' ends and what is to be ascribed to 'plural' and to 'genitive'. Finally, preference was given to the minimal significant unit.

Luis Jorge Prieto 105 Recent publications (e.g., 1988) show that Prieto is still faithful to his isomorphic vision, with his insistence on using the same approach to syntax on both planes. His early plea for the explication of the prosodic pattern prior to the extraction of segmental phonemes was theoretically justified. But no serious phonologist, in search of segmental phonemes, had ever disregarded prosodical conditioning. Those who thought their first duty was to set out the characteristics of the specific language under consideration went on centering their attention on distinctive features. Prieto's insistence on the syllable as an indispensable step in the analysis of the utterance, reminiscent of Hjelmslev's, was rejected as one of those hasty generalizations so common with theoreticians who jump to conclusions before gathering enough factual information. A number of clever suggestions, such as that of operating with dimensions, were perceived as needless complications as long as no actual descriptions were there to afford a proof of their efficiency.

Access to Cognition

If real linguists are inclined to stress the communicative function of language, epistemologists are often tempted to consider language mainly as an access to cognition. Prieto, who is generally more intent on expressing his thoughts than on communicating them, is understandably attracted by the problems connected with the acquisition of knowledge; this led him to his very fruitful theory of the instrumental act. Linguists, after Sapir and Whorf, are often tempted to make language, if not the only access to knowledge, at least the framework within which the mental activity of man proceeds. Prieto's insistence on the instrumental act as one of the fundamental accesses to the perception of the world is a most precious contribution to our understanding of mankind. The fact that man obviously shares with apes that approach to knowledge does not affect its importance. What in Prieto's conception of man's approach to knowledge is not certain to meet with general acceptance is his positing, as units of cognition, of 'objects' identified as spatially and temporally unanalyzable. In that framework, we might assume that an object is identified by a subject if the latter is found to 'operate' with iL Of course, all depends on what is meant by 'operating'. Everybody would be ready to assume that speakers 'operate' with minimal significant units, since they are supposed to choose among them at every point in the utterance in order to say

106 Jeanne Martinet what they want to say. But once a moneme (or whatever we want to call it) is chosen, its form follows automatically: the succession of sounds in [tri] is automatic as soon as what is meant is 'tree' [tri] (or should we present it as /tri/?)—it is a single articulatory habit. Only phoneticians, and more recently linguists, with the help of alphabetic writing, have managed to analyze it into three successive units. Punsters and poets, with play on words, spoonerisms, rhymes, and alliterations, manage, in a devious way, to 'operate' with phonemes. But many language users balk at the idea of analyzing the form of significant units, unless supported by the spelling. What is important in such matters is not to detect how far some people can proceed in the analysis, but to find what characterizes the handling of the language by the most ungifted members of the community, those who can neither read nor joke. This would seem to indicate that we should posit here not the existence of discrete realities (or perhaps 'knowledge' versus its absence), but some gradualness leading from the capacity of achieving results in the handling of a tool to perfect consciousness of the separate existence of something, real or imagined. Prieto's decision to acknowledge an 'object' in a phoneme, but to deny it in a distinctive feature, may be perceived as arbitrary. Arguing that writing systems may reach the phoneme in their downward analytical trend, but not beyond, just points to insufficient information: in Japanese syllabaries, the distinctive feature of voice is perfectly and regularly identified.

Logic and Beyond In the semiotic domain, Prieto stands, initially, in the same line as Eric Buyssens and Georges Mounin. The present writer, who, in her Clefs pour la simiologie (1973), deliberately aimed at a functional semiotics, often followed the lead of these two scholars, and Prieto's as well. Yet, here again, Prieto's temperament and personal bias very soon set him apart. This shows, for instance, in his frequent recourse to logic, his recurring use of such terms as 'classes', 'universe of discourse', 'relations of identity', 'inclusion', 'exclusion', 'intension and extension', 'intersection between classes', and so forth. These notions are not absent elsewhere, but they usually appear when needed for a better grasp of what is presented. With Prieto, they hardly come as a help for a better understanding of the matter: without warning, 'class' is found to designate what others would call a

Luis Jorge Prieto 107 unit, because he thinks his readers should never forget that a unit necessarily results from an abstraction. This type of insistence is bound to confuse and antagonize many of those who try to penetrate his universe. Some will find him needlessly fastidious, nay, finical. Other readers, however, may appreciate a logical framework as a help, and his level of abstraction as an incitement to proceed. In any case, one cannot help but be impressed by the thoroughness of his approach and his consistency in his pursuit of the accounting of how and why human knowledge is shaped and transmitted. In one of his most recent writings (1987b), he makes clear that the validity of knowledge lies not in its truth, but in its pertinence. A subject knows an object through his practice, in which the object is either the aim or the means, the cause or the effect, and stands for one concept or the other. For Prieto, knowledge is never gratuitous, but always dependent upon relevancy; and the semiotics he develops aims at being not a theory of knowledge, but its raison d'etre. It is worth overcoming whatever obstacle we encounter when tackling Prieto's message. We should devote all the time and patience necessary to following the elaboration of his theory, from his first writings to his most recent ones. We shall discover how one contribution casts light on some other that follows or precedes, and thus how what had been overlooked in a first reading appears significant and becomes part of the final edifice.

References Barthes, Roland 1964 Preface. Communication 4. Buyssens, Eric 1943 Les langages et le discours. Brussels: Office de Publicity. Martinet, Andr6 1939 Röle de la correlation dans la phonologie diachronique. Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague 8,273-88. 1960 Elements de linguistique generale. Paris: Armand Colin. Martinet, Jeanne 1973 Clefs pour la semiologie. Paris: Seghers. Prieto, Luis Jorge 1954 Traits oppositionnels et traits contrastifs. Word 10, 43-59. (Reproduced in 1975a: 3-24,26.)

108 Jeanne Martinet 1964

Principes de noologie: Fondements de la thiorie fonctionelle du signifie. The Hague: Mouton. (Italian trans. 1967; Japanese trans. 1981.) 1966 Messages et signaux. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. (Spanish trans. 1967; Polish trans. 1970; Italian trans. 1971; German trans. 1972; Portuguese trans. 1973; Japanese and Greek trans, forthcoming.) 1968 La s6miologie. In Encyclopidie de la Pleiade: Le langage, 93-144. Paris: Gallimard. 1969 Langue et style. La Linguistique 1,5-24. 1975a Etudes de linguistique et de semiologie ginirales. Geneva: Droz. (Spanish trans. 1977.) 1975b Pertinence et pratique: Essai de simiologie. Paris: Minuit. (Italian trans. 1976; Spanish trans. 1977; Japanese trans. 1984.) 1987a On the identity of the work of art. Versus 46, 31-41. 1987b Une simiologie: Problömes et parcours. Degris 49-50, j-jl2. 1988 Caractiristique et dimension: Essai de difinition de la syntaxe. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 42,25-63. 1989 Saggi di semiotica I: Sulla conoscenza. Parma: Pratiche Editrice. (Cf. Classe e concetto, Sulla pertinenza e sui rapporti saussuriani di 'confronto' et 'discambio'.) Togeby, Knud 1951 Structure immanente de la langue frangaise. Copenhagen: Nordisk Sprog-og Kulturforlag.

Jeanne Martinet (b. 1920) teaches semiotics at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne, Paris. Her principal research interests include semiotics, general linguistics (especially theory of word formation), and language acquisition, both spoken and written. Among her publications are De la thiorie linguistique ά Venseignement de la langue (1972), Clefs pour la semiologie (1973), Linguistique et semiologie fonctionelle (1983, with Andr6 Martinet), and Vers I'icrit avec alfonic (1983). Address: 16, rue Pierre-Bonnard, 92260 Fontenay-aux-Roses, France.

Semiotics and Art: The Contribution of Mieczystaw Wallis (1895-1975) 1 Zdiszlaw Najder

The idea that signs and their systems are essential to the understanding of cultural phenomena and ought to be the sole focus for the humanities has become fashionable again since the end of World War II. But it is hardly a new one. Greek sophists linked signs to language. In the early 1700s, Giambattista Vico announced that concepts found in language play a crucial role in cultural developments. And at the end of the nineteenth century Charles S. Peirce placed meaning at the center of philosophical questioning. The inspiration for this widespread interest in semantics and the multiplication of semiological theories comes from four main sources: (1) The systematic analysis of meaning which showed meaning and truth to be dependent upon a given linguistic system (system of signs) and given attitudes (pragmatic conception). This approach tried to increase the precision of reasoning, to provide an integrated textual analysis, and to discover the true nature of thinking and its relationship to reality. (2) The search for common principles, induced by cultural philosophers' speculation about and art historians' research on intellectual and artistic forms of expression. Such principles were found in the creation and understanding of signs and their interdependence. This approach tried to discover the essence of culture and humanity; its method was the historical and cultural analysis of human artifacts. (3) The linguistic study of the forms and structures of natural languages. Linguists' findings, but mostly their method and impressive scientific arsenal, spread to other humanistic disciplines. The immediate goal of this approach was to find the most precise data classification possible; its long-range goal was to make the humanities adopt scientific methods and to provide them with a terminology as precise as that used by the natural sciences. (4) Cybernetics and communication theories. By developing artificial languages, those disciplines provided natural languages and human communication with analytical models which showed that all communication can be reduced to a single conceptual system. As a result, the emphasis shifted from meaning and

110 Zdiszlaw Najder symbols to the act of communication itself. A new 'panlinguism' declared that all man-made creations, even clothing and architecture, are languages.

Plate 1. Mieczystaw Wallis When applied to the study of the arts, semiotics borrowed from a variety of sources. For example, the most recent brand of semiological aesthetics/art theory focuses on communication. This alleviates difficulties found in the philosophicalpragmatic brand of semiological aesthetics represented by Charles Morris or Susanne Κ. Langer, who focus on the traditional signe-signifiant-signifie. And it also solves the problems raised by Umberto Eco, whose focus on sign and meaning blurs the distinction between names of real objects on the one hand, and names of fictional objects and abstract concepts on the other. But if the old (1950s) semiological aesthetics' terminology and concepts suffered from awkward stiffness, the 'new' semiological aesthetics all too easily overlooks logical problems and stubborn data diversity. Mieczysfaw Wallis was one of the first scholars to apply semiotics to the study of art. His essay concerning the understanding of representative elements in art, which he presented at the Second International Congress of Aesthetics in Paris in

MieczystewWallis 111 1937, was among the first works to address the problem of representation in art (Wallis 1983a). A Renaissance man, Wallis was learned in a variety of subjects ranging from philosophy and art history to painting techniques, psychology, and classical music. He was also extremely well-read. A fascinated explorer of Western as well as non-Western cultures, he practiced aesthetics both as a scholar and as a friend of the arts. In his study of aesthetics, Wallis was inspired by the first two above-mentioned sources; but he was aware of linguistics as well, and, even before getting acquainted with cybernetics and information theory, he considered art works as message-sending objects. Remarkable as this diversity of interests and inspiration was, however, Wallis's greatest quality was his ability to test new ideas against the requirements of clarity and rigor worked out by contemporary philosophy and epistemology. In this respect, he emulated Stanislaw Ossowski's U Podstaw estetyki (1933), which to this day is the best Polish text on the philosophy of aesthetics. Wallis's starting point was experience (his own and others'), which he then interpreted and organized. Yet, when developing and testing hypotheses, he never failed to apply the criteria of scientific accuracy which he had inherited from the Warsaw and Lwow Schools of Philosophy, and in particular from Kazimierz Twardowski, Jan Lukasiewicz, and Tadeusz Kotarbinski. Wallis considered himself a member of the Warsaw School, whose 'respect for the facts and striving toward rigorous terminology and logic' (Wallis n.d.) he highly praised. That very statement explains why Wallis's works stand out among more daring, colorful, or dramatic ones. His philosophical foundations are always visible; he avoided tautologies and followed hypotheses through to verification or refutation. In addition, Wallis's worship of facts matched his worship of theory. He never stretched a theory to force more facts into it, nor did he cut or twist facts to fit a theory. On the contrary, he developed his hypotheses by testing and refining theoretical models. While aiming at clarity and explicitness, he managed to avoid getting lost in methodological subtleties and pedantic details. Wallis was primarily interested in the methodology, rather than the ontology, of semiotics. Unlike other philosophers, he did not believe that a particular meaning constitutes the essence, the defining character of art works and other artistic phenomena; rather, he used semiological categories to analyze art. Nor did he believe that those categories could describe every element of every art work; instead

112 Zdiszlaw Najder he limited their use to concrete objects which refer to objects other than themselves—i.e., to signs referring to designates. Such a system, based on the triad signe-signifiant-signifie, allowed him to avoid radical philosophical propositions and overdeveloped theoretical speculation. And, since he was not committed to 'total semiotics', for which art is but a system of signs, he did not need to wonder what might be the meaning of those signs, and to what object other than themselves they might refer. Wallis nonetheless considered all art works as message-sending objects. The message need not be information in the strict sense of the term; rather, it is a stimulus. Although he did not use the jargon of communication theory, Wallis recognized the importance of communication in art. Such concern is visible in the now classic study Wyraz i zycie psychyczne (Wallis 1939). In it, Wallis's definition of 'expression' appears remarkably free from the expressionistic and psychological biases of the day: 'An art work is always destined for a public, be it small or large, and it is always structured so as to be correctly seen, interpreted, and experienced by that public' (Wallis 1939). Although he was converted to aesthetic pluralism by Tatarkiewicz's 'Nowe prjdy w sztuce' (1913), Wallis was not a relativist. While acknowledging that aesthetic values depended upon several factors, including time, he tried to set limits to this relativity as an art historian and theoretician. To do so, he laid the foundations for a theory of correct and incorrect aesthetic experience in his preface to Przetycie i wartoSc (Wallis 1968). According to Wallis, the aesthetic object (message) contains a set of signs and stimuli. To comprehend the message means to interpret its meaning correctly and to have the physical and psychological ability to 'receive' its intellectual and emotional stimuli. Unless those conditions are fulfilled, the aesthetic experience is incorrect, and the resulting aesthetic evaluation is not properly founded. Unfortunately, Wallis never developed that theory. Thus it is difficult to say how he would have defined what constitutes the 'appropriate' physical and psychological ability. Furthermore, he laid the foundations for his theory convinced that, in order to understand an art work correctly, one must see it as the artist intended (Wallis 1983f), whereas in later years he seems to have abandoned this idea. Another point which Wallis failed to clarify, although it appears quite often in his works, is the difference between aesthetic knowledge and aesthetic experience. To some extent, Wallis's aesthetic concepts are sketchy, but I do not see that as a weakness. On the contrary, intellectual sketches are stimulating because they are

Mieczyslaw Wallis 113 not caught in a torrent of words. Besides, Wallis never intended to create a closed system. He merely wanted to sort out the cornucopia of aesthetic objects. His late works, which are broad syntheses, exemplify how helpful the semiological method can be in explaining the origins and history of artistic forms as well as the structure of art works. Among such works are two articles, 'Napisy w malarstwie' and 'Semantyczne i symboliczne pierwiastki w architekturze' (Wallis 1983d and 1983h), as well as two books, Dzieje zwierciadta ijego rola w röznych dziedzinach kultury (1956) and Autoportret (1964). One of Wallis's most important contributions was the introduction of a more accurate and more sophisticated terminology, better suited to show basic divisions and to classify phenomena in a way that made similarities and differences between them easier to recognize and to understand. I believe that most of those terms were sound; the only infelicitous choice was the ambiguous 'semantic field', which Wallis defined as the spatial determinants of signs. But even so, the very admission that the meaning of signs changes according to their position within a given space is quite remarkable. At any rate, Wallis constantly reworked his terminology to improve it—one need only compare Ό Rozumieniu...' (19830 and 'Geneza i podstawy malarstwa bezprzedmiotowego' (1983c) to be convinced of it. The most sound terms include 'semantic enclave' (1983e), schemata and pleromata (1983g), semantization and desemantization, the distinction—essential—between symbol and the symbol's sign (1983b), dependent and independent representative works, mimesis and representation (1983f), and concrete and abstract painting. Wallis's concern for redefining several widely used terms can be seen in 'Geneza i podstawy...'(1983c). Reading Wallis's philosophical treatises, one cannot but observe how wrong his timing was. His outstanding Wyraz i iycie psychyczne (1939) was published on the eve of World War II, and remained out of print for the next thirty years. Wartosci estetyczne tagodne i ostre (1969) was trapped in the ideological freeze of the Stalinist period. Wallis had planned to pursue a semiological approach in his study of art, but the war and two decades of intellectual seclusion from the West prevented him from keeping up with the changes which swept the field of semiotics. Resuming his research shortly before 1960, Wallis had every right to feel discouraged. By then, essays on semiotics had multiplied, and the method which he had mapped out a quarter of a century before was so widely used as to seem banal. Yet, despite those adverse conditions, Wallis's research quickly gained momentum. Two of his last semiotic essays, '&wiat sztuk i swiat znaköw' (1961)

114 Zdiszlaw Najder and Ό tytufach dzief sztuki' (1971), introduced new concepts and broadened the approach to semiotics. Wallis's early works have a twofold value. First, they show that in the 1930s Polish humanistic scholars were in the avant garde. Their approach was both innovative and philosophically mature. Second, Wallis's categories and terminology are still useful today. As for his later works, especially the analytical ones, they provide a remarkable illustration of some practical applications of semiotics to art history, and they help sort out the cornucopia of modern art. Although Wallis devoted most of his attention to visual arts, his remarks on literature and music prove helpful to students and inspirational to scholars in those disciplines. Wallis's last complete work, 'Swiat sztuk i swiat znaköw' (1961), eventually published in English as Arts and Signs (1975a), deserves special mention here because of the challenging way in which the essays contained in the volume picture the relationship between those two complementary worlds. The essays are organized both chronologically and thematically, with a first part devoted to general or philosophical themes and a second part devoted to the analysis of specific arts. Although erudite, Wallis was an extremely modest individual who always quoted others scrupulously and gave them the credit they deserved. Death caught him in his full intellectual maturity, erudition, and mastery of analytical skills. 'Swiat sztuk i swiat znaköw' (1961) showed great promise. So did Secesja (1967a) and P6zne dzieta wielkich artystöw (1975b), remarkable for the subtlety of their interpretation as well as for their interest in a wide range of artistic phenomena. Wallis's works give but an incomplete picture of the man. If only to do justice to a deserving and courageous individual who did not like to boast about himself, I will add a short biography to his intellectual portrait. Mieczyslaw Wallis was born in Warsaw on June 16th, 1895 in a polonized Jewish family, the son of Bronislaw Walfisz and Helena Lipszyc. He began using 'Wallis' as a pseudonym in 1922 and eventually adopted it as his last name. From 1905 to 1908, the Walfisz family lived in Germany. In 1913, Wallis graduated from the Boys' Prague Lyceum in Warsaw. As a child, he was interested in science: first biology and psychology, and then philosophy and epistemology, which was testing the limits of science. During the academic year 1913-1914 he studied Natural Science, Philosophy, and Drawing at the University of Heidelberg, where he attended the lectures of Wilhelm Windelband. At war's outbreak, he was briefly interned as a Russian national. In the fall of 1915 he enrolled at the newly

Mieczysbw Wallis 115 opened University of Warsaw, where he began undergraduate studies in Philosophy under Jan Lukasiewicz, Stanislaw LeSniewski, and Tadeusz Kotarbinski; in addition, he studied Art History and Polish literature. Those who knew Wallis as a gentle, quiet man overcome by melancholy toward the end of his life, a man of slight build and timid manners, could not imagine him as a soldier and a conspirator. Yet in 1916 Wallis joined Pilsudski's Polish Military Organization. On November 11th, 1918 he volunteered as a soldier in the Academic Legion, which later became the 36th Infantry Regiment. In his diary, we find the following entry: 17 November 1918. Standing guard at Namiestnikowski Palace on Krakowskie Przedmiescie. During the war, the palace was occupied by the Zivilgouvernement des Generalgouvernements Warschau. Two companies of the German Officers' School had been brought here from Jabfonna. According to an agreement signed a few days ago between Pilsudski and the German Soldatenrat, the cadets were given twenty-four hours to leave. They were allowed to take their personal belongings, one blanket and one weapon. [The Poles] were extremely upset at the thought that they could take even that much with them; after all, everybody despises the Germans. On their last night, the cadets held a banquet in the dancing room. They drank, sang and toasted the Kaiser. I was standing guard on Krakowskie Przedmiescie and could hear the cheers. [The diary mentions that the Germans had kept their machine guns aimed at the Polish guard during the whole affair]. At 2:00 a.m. the lights went off. At 5:00 a.m. the cadets marched off in formations of four, exactly as they had been instructed. Although it was early morning, a small crowd gathered on the sidewalk and started shouting insults and raising fists. At 6:00 a.m. two civilians appeared. They presented me with an order signed by Pilsudski by which they were empowered to seize the archives of the Zivilgouvernement. The two civilians were Professors Marceli Handelsman and Stanisfaw Kgtrzynski. The palace floor was littered with empty wine and liquor bottles and cigar boxes. On the walls hung posters advertising war loans. I took them down and eventually donated them to the Art History Club of the University of Warsaw. (Wallis n.d.)

116 Zdiszlaw Najder Following a year of military service, Wallis resigned from the Academic Legion in order to graduate from the University. In July 1920 he volunteered again and fought on the front lines as a sergeant in the 192nd Infantry Regiment. This unusual soldier who read Salammbo between attacks must not have neglected his military duties, though, because he finished the war with the rank of Second Lieutenant Wallis earned his Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Warsaw in 1921, with Tadeusz Kotarbinski as his advisor. His thesis was a defense of the scientific character of the humanities. Wallis argued that neither individuation nor the unreliable character of generalizations warranted denying the Humanities the rank of a science. For one thing, geography and astronomy, which are viewed as sciences, are individuating disciplines; furthermore, even the generalizations made by the natural sciences are not totally reliable, because they are based on partial induction. Between the wars, Wallis earned a living as an art critic. He was one of the most outstanding and versatile specialists of his time on modern Polish art, which he followed very closely. His articles and art reviews appeared almost exclusively in two newspapers to which he was a regular contributor for many years: Robotnik and Wiadomosci Literackie,2 In addition, he published numerous scholarly articles and translations, among which were a remarkable series of popularizing articles about aesthetics in Wiedza i Zycie* and two short monographs on Stanislaw Noakowski and Ludomir Slendziriski. Wallis frequented socialist and liberal circles, and was ideologically close to people like Tadeusz Kotarbinski and Stanisfaw Ossowski. His Jewish origins caused occasional vexations, which he would bear in melancholic silence. He never let others' ignorance or chauvinism obscure the values which bound him to Poland. In 1939 Wallis once again defended his country, this time as commander of an anti-aerial artillery platoon. After Warsaw's surrender, he was taken prisoner and spent the next five and a half years at Osterode and Woldenberg, where he engaged in teaching. After the war, he resumed writing and teaching. Upon completion of his Praca Habilitacyjna at the University of Warsaw in 1945, Wallis was appointed to the chair of aesthetics of the newly opened University of Lödz. He taught there until 1965 while lecturing at the University of Warsaw and at the theatre and film academies in tödz—the Paiistwowa Wyzsza Szkofe Teatralna and the Panstwowa Wyzsza Szkofa Filmowa. In addition, he belonged to several learned societies at home and abroad.

Mieczy sfaw Wallis 117 Toward the end of his life, especially after his wife's death, Wallis was depressed and sad, although he bore his grief with philosophical propriety. Age did not curb his intellectual activity: Pözne dzieta wielkich artystdw (1975b) was published a few months before his death on October 25th, 1975. The eulogy he wrote for his closest friend, Henryk Etzenberg—very different as a philosopher, but as a man very much like him—describes Wallis perfectly: He aimed at moderation and discreet elegance in his behavior and was never pretentious nor offensive. Likewise, his dress and writings were never outrageous. (Wallis 1967b: 108)

Notes 1. Translated from the Polish by Alice-Catherine Carls. 2. Robotnik was the daily organ of the Polish Socialist Party; Literackie was a leading cultural weekly, liberal in tone. 3. A monthly popularizing science and the humanities.

Wiadomosci

References Ossowski, Stanislaw 1933 U Podstaw estetyld. Warsaw: Kasa im. Mianowskiego. Tatarkiewicz, Wladystaw 1913 Nowe prjidy w sztuce. Cztowiek i swiat 4,228-281. Wallis, Mieczysfaw 1939 Wyraz i zycie psychyczne. Wilno: Gebethner and Wolff. 1949 Warto&i estetyczne fagodne i ostre. Przeglad Filosoficzny 45. 1956 Dzieje zwierciadta i jego rola w röznych dziedzinach kultury. Lödz: tödzkie Towarzystwo Naukowe. 1961 Swiat sztuk i Swiat znaköw. Estetyka 2,46-47. 1964 Autoportret. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Artystyczne i filmowe. 1967a Secesja. Warsaw: Aikady. 1967b Henryk Elzenberg. Ruch Filosoficzny 2.

118 Zdiszlaw Najder 1968 1975a 1975b 1983a 1983b 1983c 1983d 1983e 1983f 1983g 1983h

1983i n.d.

Prze'zycie i wartosS; pisma ζ estetyki i nauki ο sztuce, 1931-1949. Kraköw: Wydawnictwo Literackie. Arts and Signs. Bloomington: Indiana University Publications. P6zne dzieta wielkich artystöw. Warsaw: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. L'Art au point de vue sömantique—une möthode r&ente de l'esth6tique. In Szkice semiotyczne. Warsaw: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Dzieje sztuki jako dzieje struktur semantycznych. In Szkice semiotyczne. Warsaw: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Geneza i podstawy malarstwa bezprzedmiotowego. In Szkice semiotyczne. Warsaw: Pafistwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Napisy w malarstwie (initially published in 1971). In Szkice semiotyczne. Warsaw: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Ο Polu semantycznym. In Szkice semiotyczne. Warsaw: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Ο Rozumieniu.... In Szkice semiotyczne. Warsaw: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Ο znakach ikonicznych. In Szkice semiotyczne. Warsaw: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Semantyczne i symboliczne pierwiastki w architekturze (initially published in 1968). In Szkice semiotyczne. Warsaw: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Ο tytutech dziet sztuki. In Sztuki i znaki. Warsaw: Panstwowy Instytut Wydawniczy. Autobiographical Notes. Unpublished manuscript, courtesy of Aleksander Wallis.

Zdiszlaw Najder (b. 1930) is former Director of the Polish Service of Radio Free Europe; he now teaches, lectures, and researches. His principal research interests include philosophy of value, the life and work of Joseph Conrad, and comparative literature. Among his publications are Conrad's Polish Background (1964), Nad Conradem (About Conrad) (1965), Values and Evaluations (1973), Joseph Conrad—A Chronicle (1983), and Conrad under Familial Eyes (1983). Address: Lichferes-sur-Yonne, 89660 Chatel-Censoir, France.

Mieczystaw Wallis 119

Alice-Catherine Carls (b. 1950) is Assistant Professor of History and Political Science at Lambuth College in Jackson, Tennessee. Her principal research interests include U.S.-Polish relations, Poland's economic rebirth after World War I, church-state relations in contemporary Poland, and communism in Eastern Europe, as well as literary translations from Polish into French and English. Among her publications are La ville libre de Dantzig en crise ouverte, 24.10.1938-1.9.1939—Politique et diplomatique (1982) and 'Human freedom and social justice—case study #1: Poland' (1982), as well as several translations from Polish. Address: Department of Social Science, Lambuth College, Jackson, TN 38301.

Places

Brazil: A Culture in Tune with Semiotics Lucia Santaella Braga

Nonverbal Signs in Brazilian Culture Semiotics may be approached from a variety of viewpoints. One of these is to consider it as a science that brings into relief the presence in and importance among human cultures of nonverbal systems of signs. The field of semiotics evidently extends well beyond nonverbal signs; nor is it limited to human cultures (see for instance Sebeok 1985 and Deely et al. [eds.] 1986). Even so, I shall begin this essay by limiting semiotics to just one of its aspects: the semiotics of culture. Within this topic, I shall indicate a single sub-topic—that of nonverbal systems of signs. In doing so, I take up a privileged point of view whence to begin to discuss semiotics in Brazil. From this viewpoint, it may be said that Brazilian culture is a semiotic culture. The role played by systems of nonverbal signs in Brazilian life is a large-scale phenomenon; it extends not only throughout daily life, but also into popular festivals, informal celebrations, and formal ceremonies. It reaches not only into formal, informal, and spontaneous processes of teaching and learning, but also into the activities of scientific research. Brazilian culture is fundamentally an oral, visual, tactile, and corporal culture. It is not by mere chance that folklore specialists, anthropologists, and ethnomusicologists from other countries have displayed so much interest in the exuberance of the nonverbal manifestations of Brazil. Neither is it just a case of the attraction of the exoticism of a world which fascinates exactly because it still contains something of the savage. This type of attraction does exist; but it is not on this that I wish to concentrate my attention. What I want to emphasize is the fact that, independent of social class or geographical region, independent of degree of development, there is always in Brazil a copious stream, evident or underground, of nonverbal culture—a dominant nonverbal culture. To illustrate the point, it is no exaggeration to say that, in general terms, Brazilians are literally incapable of living without music and dance. The closer one comes to the ordinary people, the greater the truth of this statement

124 Lucia Santaella Braga The melting pot of races and cultural influences which make up the ever-precarious and ever-mutable unity of Brazilian identity is one factor which must have contributed to this state of affairs. Hierarchies in social, interpersonal, and intersubjective relationships are always weak in their linkages; this results in flexibility in the face of the unknown and allows continual changes in social roles. There is a positive side to all this: it shows itself in an aptitude for good cheer, for cordiality, for that capacity for inventing and creating on the basis of nothing at all which characterizes Brazilians, from the most humble to the most privileged. There is also another, profoundly negative side to this; it appears in the form of irresponsible frivolity, acute opportunism, and an inability to obey norms and regulations, which constitutes a grave disturbance in collective and social life in Brazil. 1 have no intention of entering upon discussions, more proper to anthropology or sociology, suggested by the questions raised above. This subject would be suitable for an essay of a different sort. What I want to do is direct our attention to the semiotic issues present in the factors of Brazilian culture. Thus we will see that Carnival is a real paradigm of Brazilian cultural life. I am not referring here to the carnival festival which takes place once a year in February and which, these days, is a mere tourist attraction. I refer to a generalized process of carnivalization which permeates every layer of social and individual life in this country. Before any of the Bakhtinian theses about carnivalization (Bakhtin 1974) had achieved currency in Brazil, a Brazilian anthropologist, Roberto Da Matta (1977), had worked out a critical reading of the Brazilian character, this displayed numerous similarities with the theories of parody, laughter, carnivalization, and dialogism developed by Bakhtin. Later, when Bakhtin's work began to circulate in Brazil in French, English, or even Brazilian translation (Bakhtin 1978,1981; Holquist [ed.] 1981), Da Matta's work came to receive renewed recognition. It was as if he had applied Bakhtin's theories before he even knew of them. But the question which lies behind this episode is exactly the reality of Brazil: that reality which Da Matta succeeded in describing with such acumen. And the fact remains that this reality coincides with and gives real support to the theses of Bakhtin himself. However, what gives Brazilian culture its character at the same time robs it of its equilibrium. For a better understanding of what I want to say, I shall seek support in a semiotic postulation. In accordance with Peirce, the most accomplished forms of signs are those which display perfect equilibrium between the three properties which make a sign function as such: (1) quality, (2) existence, and

Semiotics in Brazil 125 (3) law. These properties are themselves responsible for the division into three major types of signs: (1) icon, (2) index, and (3) symbol. Now for Peirce, equilibrium in a sign process is achieved when there is equivalence between the three types of signs, in such a way that none of them holds preponderance over the others (CP 3.363,4.531). On this basis it may be affirmed that the Brazilian culture is typically a culture in imbalance, due to the dominance of nonverbal signs, the fact that a more lettered culture has never really taken root and lacks weight in the country. Only a consideration of this type may lead us to an understanding of the ideological power of mass culture, and of the gigantic character of television empires in Brazil. Part of the question lies in the fact that, in a country where a very large part of the population is not even literate, the arrival of means of mass communication, and electronic communication in particular, was an abrupt leap. The population changed from the folklore phase of oral communication, in which they were agents, to the form of urban folklore represented by mass communication, in which they were passive recipients. These means of communication in Brazil—in particular radio and TV—had already begun to operate in a circuit which tends to expand in an all-devouring and all-excluding manner. Mass communication encountered in Brazil primary, almost virgin territory; cultural alternatives powerful enough to face up to and interact with the consumption of the electronic message were entirely lacking. Yet illiteracy is neither the only motive nor a sufficient motive to explain the weakness of other sectors of cultural production in the face of the messages carried by radio and television. In a country which has not reached the point of creating and developing relatively autonomous cultural traditions, one in which even the most privileged of elites have always sated their thirst at the founts of foreign culture (and poorly filtered at that), and in which the process of education of these same elites by way of their schools has always lacked continuity, television has spread and will spread its tentacles; it devours any and all alternatives to the stimulus for the growing of lettered forms of production and creation of messages. And so, even when the poor segments of the population learn to read and write, they still fall, together with the illiterate, under the dominion and hegemony of the industrialization of culture (see Santaella Braga 1982). An approach of this nature does not, however, exhaust the examination of the problem. The other side of the question involves the way in which TV, as a means of transmitting messages, is in tune with the rhythm and atmosphere of the

126 Lucia Santaella Braga 'Brazilian way of life'. The superficiality, the sudden changes in point of view, the discontinuity of language brought about by abrupt cuts, all of which characterize the syntax of television signs, encounter an echo in the mechanisms of perception, in the behavior, and in the ways of facing reality which to a certain extent define the Brazilians. This is the path I have chosen as the beginning of this essay; it was chosen because the cultural characteristics of Brazil, which I have tried to introduce in brief, are factors of the greatest importance for an understanding of how semiotic research appeared in Brazil, and of how it continues to develop there. It is not possible to separate the manner in which the Brazilians behave in general from the way we behave in regard to science or art. Thus it is that on the one hand a typically Brazilian taste for novelty and a capacity for opening up before the unknown, and on the other hand the appeal of the nonverbal signs through which semiotics is commonly presented, together constitute a powerful attraction to the interests of young researchers and students. All too frequently, however, this interest does not go beyond curiosity, and those who appear at first to be interested are many; those whose interest persists, however, are not so many. Furthermore, the nonverbal identity of semiotics, which, as I said, is dominant in Brazil, only too often serves to attract those who misguidedly think that a science of the nonverbal must mean something lightweight, something free of the arduous tasks which characterize scientific activity, free of dedication, of patient discipline, and of resolute hard work. To this must be added the difficulties serious researchers must confront with regard to the distrust which a young science, not fully established by consensus, raises in those institutions responsible for supporting research. While this is common in rich countries, the problem is without doubt more severe in a country where funds for any sort of research are always short. If funds are short for priority areas, what can one say about funds for areas that are still emerging? Just this: they always end up at the back of the line. Fortunately, in recent years the distrust of semiotics has been decreasing. There is, without a doubt, a climate of increased recognition not only in universities and in the funding organizations, but also in the organs of mass communication, and above all the newspapers. I mention of the newspapers at this point because attention must be drawn to the power exercised by the means of mass communication, and particularly the journalistic media, over academic circles and intellectuals in Brazil. When the newspapers begin to open up to the existence of a new scientific area, this is a

Semiotics in Brazil 127 most important sign that many of the prejudices have been overcome. After two decades of research work, carried out by a fair number of scholars who have bet on their efforts and devoted themselves to creating and spreading this new field of knowledge, recognition at last seems to be in sight.

The Pioneers If this postulation of mine is correct, that the essential nature of Brazilian culture is fundamentally semiotic, then the roots of semiotics in Brazil must be deeper and more remote than those pointed out by the proto-semioticians and effective semioticians who began their work in the area some two decades ago. The deeper roots will appear in this essay as a sort of leitmotif, as it were. Like a theme in music which seems to disappear and reappear intermittently, so the roots of the identity between semiotics and Brazilian culture will be treated in this essay. However, to provide information about and appreciation of that which may be called semiotic studies in Brazil, the path I have chosen is one customarily chosen in cases like this: a path both diachronic and linear. If we seek out the pioneer works (that is, the first sources of scholarly work in the field of semiotics in Brazil), these sources will reveal to us that the seeds of Brazilian semiotics were sown long before one might suppose. What I mean is this: the appearance of semiotics in Brazil was not the fruit of a purely imitative tendency derived from its appearance in other, more advanced countries. On the contrary, it had an autonomy quite its own. The influences exercised by the development of semiotics in other countries have without a doubt served to give Brazilian semiotics the necessary impetus; this is particularly true of France, a country whose intellectual movements have always appealed powerfully to the Brazilian mind. Yet even before these influences produced any effects, there were already relatively autonomous semiotic studies in Brazil. In an article on structuralism and semiotics in Brazil, Haroldo de Campos (1978: 175) points out the following factors as being responsible for the introduction of structuralist and semiotic studies in Brazil prior to the 1960s: (1) the pioneering activities of the linguist Joaquim Mattoso Cämara Jr., Roman Jakobson's follower; (2) the diffusion in Brazil of the methods and aims of Anglo-American new-criticism, especially due to the critic Afranio

128 Lucia Santaella Braga Coutinho; (3) the attempt to elaborate a sociological-structural method in some writings of the critic Antonio Cändido; (4) the divulgation of the ideas of Russian Formalism in articles by Boris Schnaiderman; (S) the poesia concreto movement in the early fifties, a movement which acquired in the Brazilian cultural scene characteristics similar to the ones of Russian Formalism, by promoting a constant dialogue between theoretical speculations and creative practice. It is worth mentioning that de Campos's article, published only in 1978, was first written in 1973, with a post-script dated 1975. Thus the author was writing right in the middle of the international structuralist boom. The repercussions of this boom were intensified in Brazil by the attraction French intellectual fashions have always exercised over the Brazilian university community. As a result, the conception of semiotics transmitted by de Campos is strongly marked by the identification of semiotics with structuralism, and of structuralism with linguistic and literary studies. For this reason, sixteen years after the writing of the article in question, a few re-evaluations and complementary observations as to the primary sources of Brazilian semiotics must be made in the light of the evolution of semiotic studies in this country. And this is what we shall do, in passing to an exposition of these sources.

The Linguist Joaquim Mattoso Camara, Jr. Mattoso Camara may be considered the first scholar to systematize the study of linguistics in Brazil. He was extremely up-to-date and well-informed regarding linguistic studies being carried out in research centers elsewhere in the world, and in the first version of his indispensable Principios de lingüistica gerat (1942), he already provided the Brazilian reader with information about structural linguistics. De Campos (1978: 176) adds: In 1943 he travelled to the United States on a Rockefeller Foundation grant. In New York he became a student of Roman Jakobson. Returning to Brazil, Mattoso introduced Jakobson's linguistics in our ambiance. Jakobson's influence is already visible in Para ο estudo da fonemica portuguesa (1953), Mattoso's doctoral dissertation of 1949. A revised and enlarged second

Semiotics in Brazil 129 edition of Mattoso's Principios appeared in 19S4. In it the Brazilian linguist presents the results of his direct contacts with outstanding North American and European colleagues, and of his readings and studies after 1942. Another fact illustrates the anticipatory stamp of Mattoso's activities: in 1938 he had already translated into Portuguese Sapir's fundamental work Language (a translation which appeared only in 1954 as a consequence of publishing difficulties and delays). In 19S6, the year of Jakobson's sixtieth birthday, Mattoso wrote a very enlightening summary account of the great linguist's career and of his contribution to modern scientific thought, emphasizing Jakobson's phonological studies, without neglecting his fundamental concern with problems of interrelation between sound and meaning, as well as his works on poetics and his contacts and exchanges with exact sciences. To sum up, Mattoso Cämara, working in an area akin to semiotics, was without doubt one of the first Brazilian intellectuals of international consequence. His studies set structuralism in Brazil on a solid foundation, and at the same time provided an equally solid foundation for the advent of the great vogue of structuralism and semiotics which would sweep Brazil in the 1970s, and to which we will return later.

The Structural Roots of Literary Theory and Criticism Afranio Coutinho, a Brazilian scholar in the field of literature, also received part of his intellectual training in the United States. In 1948, after a stay of five years in that country, Coutinho became Brazil's major proponent of literary methods of immanent criticism (see Coutinho 1953, 1954, 1957, 1968). He was directly opposed to impressionistic techniques of literary analysis, and buttressed his arguments with a rich bibliography of American and English criticism (Eliot, Richards, Empson, Leavis, Ransom, Brooks, Burke, etc.) as well as the stylology of scholars such as Spitzer, Curtius, Auerbach, Hertzfeld, Dämaso Alonso, etc., with a very special emphasis on Wellek and Warren. By its emphasis on methodological questions, on immanent reading of the text, and on adoption of scientific criteria for the study of literature, Coutinho's work made a great contribution to the generation of a structuralist practice of dealing with literary texts. Further-

130 Lucia Santaella Braga more, his postulations anticipated to a certain extent many of the programmatic rules of the structuralist method as applied to literary studies. Another scholar cited by de Campos (1978: 180) as a pioneer in the structural vision of the literary phenomenon was Antonio Cändido, former assistant to Roger Bastide on the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters of the University of Sao Paulo, who began his career as a press critic writing acute literary journalism. Candido's work may more properly be placed within a sociology of literature, due to his constant concern with the function of literature in socio-cultural processes. De Campos considered Cändido one of the precursors of the structural method, probably because of the importance Cändido (1965) attributes to the aesthetic factor as preceding all and any factor external to a literary work. Further, his conception of literature as an articulated system depending on a relational triangle (author-public-work) presupposes an organicist vision of literary work and its function in the social whole. This view was very close to the notions of gestalt structure which came to constitute one of the principal explications of the structuralist method. On the other hand, the theoretical postulations of Cändido coincide with many of the themes developed by the German rezeptionasthetische Theorie; furthermore, in one of his most famous works (1970), in the words of de Campos (1978: 181), Cändido discloses, considering last century Brazilian literature, the operating of an undercurrent, deeply embedded in remote popularesque traditions, which leads to the boldest experiments in the novel of 1920 avant-garde (Brazilian Modernism). Cändido characterizes this tradition by a complex of stylistic and social-cultural features, defining its product as the romance malandro, that is, a peculiar narrative structure, distinct in many respects from the picaresque novel. Thus, by a personal detour, Cändido meets someway with Mikhail Bakhtin's thesis of carnivalesque literature, as well as with some of Northrop Frye's typological speculations. There can be no doubt that Cändido is one of Brazil's most brilliant and outstanding scholars. Yet today, at the end of the 1980s, I do not think we can endorse de Campos's opinion that Cändido is one of the precursors of structuralist and semiotic studies in Brazil. I believe that de Campos would himself be the first to review his opinion, should it be the case. From the 1970s on, Cändido has taken a firm stand of antagonism toward structuralism, and of total indifference to semi-

Semiotics in Brazil 131 otics. Clearly this in no way diminishes the stature of his work, nor reduces the respect it deserves. Yet it would be distinctly misleading not to reconsider Cändido's position with regard to the development of semiotic studies in Brazil.

Boris Schnaiderman and Slavic Studies Boris Schnaiderman's role in the critical and creative divulgence and dissemination of Slavic studies in Brazil has been so distinguished that these studies have become inseparable from, and identified with, the intellectual personality of the man himself. Like Cändido, Schnaiderman began his career in the daily press with articles on literary criticism. For some years he was in charge of the Russian literature section of the Literary Supplement of the Estado de Säo Paulo, Säo Paulo's leading newspaper. His articles kept the Brazilian readers informed about Russian Formalism, Czech structuralism, Russian futurist poetry, Soviet art at the beginning of the century, and the theories of the Bakhtin Circle, before these works had been translated and published in the West. In a more strictly academic field, Schnaiderman defended his doctoral dissertation on the subject of Majakovskij's poetry by way of his prose. In this work, published in 1971, Majakovskij's theoretical writings and polemical remarks on such intersemiotical subjects as literature, cinema, theater, visual arts and design were gathered, translated and pertinently commented on. Particularly noteworthy in Schnaiderman's book is the account of the linkage between Majakovskij's ideas and the views of his friends and fellows in Lef magazine, the Formalist critics, (de Campos 1978: 182) As a creative writer, Schnaiderman has worked since 1961 in collaboration with the poets (and brothers) Augusto and Haroldo de Campos, on translations of modern Russian poetry (de Campos, de Campos, and Schnaiderman 1968). The seeds sown by Schnaiderman in the field of Slavic studies have bom fruit not only in the evolution of his own work, but also in the work of his students and followers, who have formed, at the University of Säo Paulo, a veritable Slavic school. More details of this will follow elsewhere in this essay.

132 Lucia Santaella Braga The First Relationship between Communication and Semiotics Among the factors that gave rise to structuralist and semiotic studies in Brazil, the last mentioned by de Campos is the concrete poetry movement. Since I shall devote a specific section of this essay to this subject, it is at the moment of greater concern to bring up a further factor behind the development of semiotics in Brazil. De Campos emphasized the linguistic and literary aspects of the origins of semiotics in this country, thus overlooking one of the factors that would in the 1980s most indelibly mark Brazilian semiotics with the seal of its own identity: the relationship between semiotics and communication. In the 1960s, Dicio Pignatari was invited to teach theory of information at the Escola Superior of Industrial Design in Guanabara, Rio de Janeiro. The students were basically architects, and it was in the field of architecture that Pignatari took the first steps toward a semiotic theory of communication. Some years later, in 1967, Pignatari was invited to give a course in Porto Alegre, in the State of Rio Grande do Sul. The seeds thus sown were many. Immediately after his course, on the initiative of Marcelo Casado D'Azevedo, an area of study was set up in the School of Architecture of Rio Grande do Sul Federal University which was to comprise theory of information, language and communication, theory of mass culture, and theory of signs. Thus it was that in Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul, by way of the pioneer work of Pignatari in courses connected with architecture, there began studies of communication based on the semiotic theories inspired by Charles Sanders Peirce, of whose work Pignatari was the first proponent in Brazil. It is curious to note that this is the only one among the sources of semiotics in Brazil which had no connection of any sort with structuralist-based linguistic or literary studies. With the decline of structuralism, which became more evident from the end of the 1970s on, it was exactly this source—semiotics in connection with communication and the nonverbal signs—which went from strength to strength in Brazil.

The 1970s A number of scholars of international reputation visited Brazil at the end of the 1960s to give lectures or courses; among them where Ruwet, Moles, Eco, Todorov, and Jakobson. More than any others, Jakobson's lectures had deep and widespread effects on university circles and on the intellectual and artistic milieu.

Semiotics in Brazil 133 A short while after his impressive visit to Brazil, a volume containing a series of Jakobson's articles was translated and published in Säo Paulo (Jakobson 1969). There was no Brazilian scholar in the area of the humanities who did not have the book always at hand for discussion with colleagues. The visits of these scholars were a landmark; they opened the doors for the emergence of a spirit of renewal which, in the 1970s, arose not only in the individual scholarly mind, but also in the academic institutions, the universities, the publishing houses, and the newspapers. The beginning of the 1970s witnessed the birth of a number of important publishing houses, and the opening of new series by the publishing houses already in the market. There was great interest among the publishers of Säo Paulo (Perspective, Cultrix), Rio de Janeiro (Tempo Brasileiro), Petröpolis (Vozes), and Porto Alegre (Globo) in the translation and publication of an extensive list of books brought from abroad (especially from France) about literary and linguistic structuralism, anthropology, philosophy, and semiology. This contributed substantially to the growth and spread of structuralist ideas in our intellectual environment. The pioneer publication which preceded even Jakobson's book was the journal Tempo Brasileiro, with its 1968 double issue entirely dedicated to structuralist thought. This was followed immediately by the Brazilian edition of Saussure (1969), Todorov (1969), and Eco (1969), and by the book Informagäo, linguagem, comunicagäo by Pignatari (1969)—in Brazil a landmark in communication studies on a semiotic basis. Between 1970 and 1975, Brazilian publishers put into circulation a torrent of translations which brought structuralism into vogue, a vogue beloved of some and detested by others to a degree hitherto unknown in the panorama of Brazilian culture. Some of these translations, those most commented on and most used at the universities, are Barthes (1971a and b), Bense (1971), Derrida (1971), Jakobson (1970), Livi-Strauss (1970), and Toledo (ed.) (1971); furthermore, a special series edited by Mendonga and Balta Neves was published by Editora Vozes. This series, under the title of 'Novas Perspectives em Comunicafäo' (New Perspectives in Communication), translated for the Brazilian reader selected essays from the French journal Communication, and included articles by A J . Greimas, C. Bremond, C. Metz, G. Genette, J. Dubois, M. Tardy, etc. As may be seen, the majority of these texts originated in France; in 1972, however, in addition to works by such French scholars as G. Genette (1972) and E. Buyssens (1972), a collection of translated essays by C.S. Peirce was brought out.

134 Lucia Santaella Braga Collections of the same type were to be published in Europe only several years later; thus some of Peirce's works reached Brazilian readers with surprising and promising promptness. From then on, the works of Peiice were a constant subject of study in Pignatari's classes at Säo Paulo Catholic University. In 1975, the popular series 'The Thinkers' brought to newspaper stalls in the streets of Brazilian cities a volume of texts by Frege and Peirce; this has subsequently gone through numerous re-editions. In 1977, Editora Perspectiva brought out a more substantial volume of Peirce's writings. Thus even in the 1970s there were three books of translations of Peirce in circulation in Brazil—one possible reason why Peirce's thought has become widespread in Brazil during the last two decades. Even before 1975, there appeared in Säo Paulo and Porto Alegre other works which were to contribute to the Brazilian intellectual profile of the 1970s, bearing clear marks of the structuralist debate. These included Derrida (1973), Prieto (1973), T. Franco Carvalhal et al. (eds.) (1974), and Kristeva (1974). Into the same context came other works, of importance because they were written by Brazilian authors: the book by Haroldo de Campos (1973) was his doctoral dissertation, defended at the University of Säo Paulo in 1972; in 1973 L. Costa Lima published a book on structuralism and literary theory, and in 1974 Pignatari published his doctoral dissertation, which had also been defended at the University of Säo Paulo in 1973. In his work, de Campos presented a polemic and brilliant study of the Proppian functions applied to an avant-garde novel from the modernist period of Brazilian literature (Macunaima [Andrade 1975], first published in 1928). Costa Lima tried to derive from L6vi-Strauss's paradigmatic anthropological methods a set of criteria for literary analytical purposes, while Pignatari focused discussion on Jakobsonian and Peircean concepts, among others, for the construction of a semiotic of literature. In addition to translations published in Brazil, there were also available at that time translations of structuralist texts published in Portugal. An example is the book edited by E. Prado Coelho (1968), which includes a famous introduction written by this outstanding Portuguese scholar. From Portugal too, among others, came the translation of Benveniste's important book (1976). In the universities, and above all in the post-graduate programs,1 foreign texts which had not so far been translated were studied in the original. This was the case with A.J. Greimas (1966,1970) and J. Dubois et al.(1970), translated only after 1975. More specifically in the field of linguistics, the works of Chomsky were studied in the original and his thought widely known in Brazil before his works were translated.

Semiotics in Brazil 135 The immense and diverse torrent of publications which appeared in the early 1970s could not have produced anything but remarkable effects. The simultaneous appearance of so many translations, for example, brought about widespread confusion regarding the sources and the specific intellectual groups that gave rise to the works. This is why the distinction that may be drawn between structuralism and post-structuralism makes no sense to a Brazilian. Thus, for instance, Saussure and Derrida were translated and published and introduced into scholarly bibliographies at almost the same time, with the result that the study of structuralism and the criticism of structuralism were carried out pari passu by Brazilian scholars. Consequently, the theories of Derrida have never had in Brazil the overwhelming effect they have had in the United States. Derrida was read in Brazil at the beginning of the 1970s, and his criticism of logocentrism produced little impact on Brazilian culture, by its very nature and destiny anti-logocentric par excellence. A further effect of note may be found in the inevitable polemics and heated debates on structuralism versus humanism, structuralism versus history, structuralism and/or Marxism, structuralism as science or method, and so on. Such debates were almost continuous, whether in newspapers, on the lecture platform, or in the classroom. As Brazil was living at the time under the yoke of a military dictatorship, there was no lack of biting criticism aimed at identifying the adepts of structuralism with the right-wing ideological tendencies aligned with the dictatorship. For some, to follow structuralism was inevitably linked with support for the politics of the military regime. There had always existed in Brazil, and at that time more than at any other, a tacit but obligatory connection between an intellectual vocation and Marxism. Even today, to be an intellectual in Brazil and not to belong to the Left is considered an unpardonable heresy. The label 'anti-Marxist' was slapped on structuralism in the first half of the 1970s, and was passed on to semiotics from 1975 on; it has always been a stone in the shoe of those who worked, and continue to work, for the development of semiotics in Brazil. This mistaken viewpoint has abated somewhat since 1985, but there is no doubt that the dominant intellectual ideology in the country has always regarded semiotics as a sort of outsider, not identifiable with the struggle of the Left. It is not the purpose of this essay to dwell on this question; however, one further fact bears witness to the matter: the present author's first book on semiotics (Santaella Braga 1980) began with a long argument to demonstrate to those in opposition that semiotics was not a bourgeois science.

136 Lucia Santaella Braga Neither does this essay include among its purposes that of evaluating the results of the structuralist movement in Brazil. What happened here was probably quite similar to what happened in other countries. Impact within the universities was great; numerous doctoral theses of high quality were defended on the subject, and many other works were parroted by epigones, a repetition of structuralist terminology which nowhere suggested an understanding of its more profound underlying postulations. What must have been different in Brazil, by comparison with other countries, was the widespread confusion in relation to the historical information of the sources. So, for example, for many people Kristeva was a contemporary of Shklovski. The great geographical distance between Brazil and the advanced centers of research, and the profusion of publications appearing in a very short period of time, left the reader with insufficient time for the processing of data and absorption of new information. This factor, in combination with the ideological elements mentioned earlier, left structuralism in Brazil with a character at once confused and camivalized to a fair degree. In the second half of the 1970s, the flood of structuralist publications abated somewhat, as indeed it did in other countries. Only the better-known authors, such as Barthes and the versatile Eco, would continue to have the entire sequence of their books translated and published in Brazil. During this period structuralism began to be identified systematically with semiotics. The relationship appeared in the titles of a number of books (see, for instance, Toledo [ed.] 1978; Chabrol [ed.] 1977). Thus it was only at the end of the 1970s that semiotics came to be established and defined in Brazil as a field of research with autonomous publications (see Kristeva, Rey-Debove, and Umiker [eds.] 1979). Until 1975, except for Bense (1971), Pignatari (1974), and Pignatari and Ferrara (1974), semiotics was inseparably linked with structuralism. Of great importance at that time was the role of L. Perrone-Mois6s, Professor at the University of Säo Paulo and a Brazilian contributor to the French journals Ροέtique and Tel Quel. Perrone-Moisis was one of the most lucid sources in Brazil of the line of criticism represented by Barthes, Blanchot, and Butor. Such thought was spread not only through her articles in journals, but also in her post-doctoral dissertation, defended in 1975 and published in 1978. If on the one hand structuralism belatedly came, at the beginning of the 1980s, to affirm the name of semiotics, on the other hand the identification of semiotics with structuralism became almost indelibly fixed in some people's minds. The great influence exercised by anything new coming from France served to accentuate

Semiotics in Brazil 137 this state of affairs, and brought about an almost complete identification of semiotics with French structuralism. What was, and, I believe, still is missing in Brazil is greater discernment in knowledge and the interest of the publishing houses in the publication of sources of and tendencies in semiotics from countries other than France. The 1980s At the beginning of the 1980s, intellectual fashion in Brazil moved on to Bakhtinian theories. In the universities, dissertations in the field of literature, communication, and culture abandoned French sources for a time, adopting in their place the theories of polyphony, parody, laughter, and carnivalization. And indeed, the field for application of these theories is most fertile in Brazil; it is present not only in our best literature, but also in the common situations of daily life. The other two main currents of influence on Brazilian intellectuality in the 1980s have been on the one hand the works of the Frankfurt School (especially W. Benjamin and T. Adorno), and on the other hand, from the end of the 1970s on, and with increasing intensity, the almost exclusive dominance of psychoanalysis, and Lacanian psychoanalysis in particular. Just to give some idea: from October 1987 to August 1989, especially in Säo Paulo, no fewer than 885 new books in psychology were published, most of them in psychoanalysis. This phenomenon arose together with other factors, including the large number of Argentine psychoanalysts who, over the last few years, have found the job market to be better in Brazil's great urban centers. Bringing with them the dernier-cri in tendencies in Parisian psychoanalysis, they have fitted like a glove into the Brazilian context, attracted as it is by the omnipresent influence of France. The psychoanalytical wave has in fact reached such proportions that it is worth wondering whether the economic, political, and ethical crisis through which Brazil is passing is not having so profound an effect on people's sanity, above all in the urban middle classes, that psychoanalytical aid has become necessary for the maintenance of a minimum of balance. From today's viewpoint, the turbulence caused by an excessive number of structuralist-semiotic publications seems a thing of the remote past. Those who identify semiotics with structuralism regard semiotics as being as outdated as structuralism itself. Indeed, if on the one hand semiotics is identified strictly with structuralism, then today it is nothing more than an almost harmless secondary

138 Lucia Santaella Braga phenomenon. On the other hand, semiotics will also appear to be extinct if we restrict ourselves to a superficial level, where what draws attention is above all the amount of noise produced. However, if we penetrate into the deeper layers of the intellectual and scholarly life of Brazil, it becomes evident that the 1980s have seen the beginning of a new phase, different from that of the 1970s. The noise of its appearance on the scene has died away, and semiotics is now putting down more substantial roots in the universities, in the curricula, in the development of researchers, and in publications by Brazilian semioticians. Thus it has become easier to identify (1) those established in semiotic research, (2) the theoretical sources which they use as starting points, (3) the ideas they defend and propagate, and (4) the schools around which they are grouped. In Rio de Janeiro, semiotic research has developed largely around mass communication, particularly television (see Trinta 1981) and advertising, though there are works which deal with the question of the sign in a more general manner (Neiva, Jr. 1982). In either case, emphasis is always on systems of nonverbal signs (Rector and Trinta 1986). The oldest group of Brazilian semioticians, and probably the most active too, is that affiliated with the Greimasian current and the Semiotic School of Paris. Led by Pefluela-Caflizal (1977,1986), who does research work in the semiotics of the image; E. Lopes (1978, 1988) on semantic and literary semiotics; Assis da Silva (1981) and Miyasaki (1988) on narratology; Fiorin (1988a and b) on semiotics and ideology; Pessoa de Barros (1988) on discourse theory; Lima (1981) on linguistics and semiotics; and Balogh (1987) on the semiotics of TV and cinema, the group is united around the Centra de Estudos Semiöticos A.J. Greimas (A.J. Greimas Center for Semiotic Studies), recently renamed Centro de Estudos Semiöticos (Center for Semiotic Studies), about which I shall give more details later. Also connected with this group are Beividas (1986, 1987), working in semiotics and psychoanalysis; and Tatit (1986), examining the semiotics of the popular song. The group is also responsible for the translation into Portuguese of some important French works on semiotics (Greimas and Court6s 1983; Helbo [ed.] 1980; Verön 1981). Another rather remarkable group in Brazil is that formed by Boris Schnaiderman in the Department of Oriental Languages and Literatures of the University of Säo Paulo. Together with Aurora Bernardini (1987), Schnaiderman has created a veritable school of Slavic studies in Brazil, working on translation, divulgence, interpretation, and criticism of linguistic, literary, artistic, and semi-

Semiotics in Brazil 139 otic theories from the Soviet Union. Ten years ago, Schnaiderman (1979) edited a collection of essays, under the title Russian Semiotics, which gave Brazilian readers an overall picture of what was being done in semiotics in the Soviet Union. Since then Schnaiderman has written many articles and a book (1983) on Bakhdn, while a good number of dissertations have been defended at the University of Säo Paulo in relation to re-readings of Russian Formalism, and of Eisenstein as a semiotician; furthermore, a collection of essays by Ivanov and another collection by Uspenski have been translated for publication by Aurora Bernardini and some of her students. Not at the University of Säo Paulo, but at Säo Paulo Catholic University, in the program of Communication and Semiotics, under the direction of H. de Campos, an outstanding master's thesis by Irene A. Machado comparing the ideas of Russian Formalism to those of Bakhtin's Circle was defended in 1986, and published in 1989. Another group at the University of Säo Paulo, in the Department of Linguistics, has gathered around C.T. Pais. Engaged in research on the frontiers between linguistics and semiotics, this group has recently begun to move away from a strictly linguistic paradigm, especially through the examination of the work of R. Thom undertaken by Beth BraiL In 1972, a group of semioticians of Peircean orientation began to form around D. Pignatari, at Säo Paulo Catholic University. Numerous doctoral dissertations applying Peircean semiotics to a variety of subjects have been defended. Pignatari left this university in 1985, but since 1976, L. Santaella Braga, a former student of Pignatari and H. de Campos, has been giving courses on Peirce every semester, and has advised the master's and doctoral works of students who may now be considered Peirce scholars as well as semioticians. Of note among them are: Plaza (1987), Saporiti (1985, 1988), U. de Oliveira (1986), Paschoale (1988, 1990), C. Abreu (1990), and Grellet (1990). In other Brazilian states, semiotic research is inseparably linked with the people working in the Regional Semiotic Associations, as we shall see below. Semiotics and Other Disciplines Semiotics and Linguistics In the course of the 1970s, the connection between semiotics and structuralism permitted a close relationship (and indeed caused a certain confusion as to the

140 Lucia Santaella Braga difference) between the two. During that decade a number of Brazilian linguists with interest in semiotics published books discussing the similarities and differences between the two fields (Escobar 1974) or establishing the connection between them (Pais 1977; Pinto 1978). Structuralist semiology always maintained a strong link with linguistics, a link which has never dissolved. The importance of Jakobson and his linguistic-semiotic theses also served to establish a link between linguistics and semiotics which was to be widely explored in our context (Chalhub 1987, 1988a). Another Brazilian linguist to work on the frontiers of semiotics and linguistics is I. Blikstein, who has been responsible for the translation of a good number of works fundamental to linguistics-semiotics (Barthes 1971a; Buyssens 1972; Jakobson 1969; Saussure 1969). In 1983, moving outside the linguistic paradigm, Blikstein published an important book in which the relationship between language and reality is discussed. Thus there formed in Brazil two groups in the field of linguistic studies, totally separate from one another: on the one hand semiotic linguistics, and on the other linguistics of North American origin (Chomskian and post-Chomskian), always the object of respectable study in Brazil. At the moment the two groups, though previously separated, are finding common ground in the theories and analysis of discourse, on which linguists and semioticians are able to converge.

Semiotics and Literature Literature was the first area to open up to semiotics in Brazil. The structural theories of narrative of the 1970s, narratological theory of Greimasian inspiration, the theses of Russian Formalism, and the theories of romanesque intertextuality and polyphony of Bahktin have been and still are constant sources in studies of literature. The contributions to literary semiotics of H. de Campos, Pignatari, and Schnaiderman in Säo Paulo, and of Costa Lima and L. Felipe Ribeiro in Rio de Janeiro have been remarkable. From 1980 on, however, the strongest group in literary studies in Brazil has been in the area of comparative literature. The absence of defined limits between literary semiotics and comparative literature, and the point at which they coincide, have led to an unproductive separation between these two groups.

Semiotics in Brazil 141 Semiotics and Communication Strictly speaking, semiotics and communication should never have been regarded as separate. On the one hand, every process of communication has necessarily to proceed by way of signs; on the other, where there are signs, there must also be communication. This is probably why, in Brazil, semiotics is linked to communication in the three major centers of semiotic studies: the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Säo Paulo, the Säo Paulo Catholic University, and the Rio de Janeiro Federal University. Semiotics is also placed in the area of communication by the institutions that support research in Brazil. Since 1977, there has been a powerful communication society in Brazil, 'Intercom' (Brazilian Society for Interdisciplinary Studies of Communication). This association brings together the country's researchers and scholars, and many professionals in various areas of communication; it also has a journal (Intercom— Revista Brasileira de Comunicagäo), which is of great importance and is recognized nationwide. Intercom holds an annual International Communication Seminar, and publishes at intervals, through 'Port-Corn' (Center for Documentation of Communication in Portuguese Language Countries), a special issue of the journal (see for instance Almeida [ed.] 1986) on the theme of 'Who's Who in Communication', containing information about all those engaged in communication research in Brazil. Finally, Intercom is a model example of a Brazilian scientific society. Unfortunately, the Brazilian Semiotic Society has never reached the same level of excellence, for reasons which will be discussed further on. Frequently researchers in communication are also semioticians, but in most cases this is not so. Communication scholars occasionally produce a work of importance for semiotics, but without the intention and without using the name semiotics. Such is the case with Muniz Sodr6 (1978, 1980, 1981, 1983, 1984, 1985), A. da Tävola (1985), and M.T. D'Amaral (1977). Such is also the case in the area of information theory, with I. Epstein (1973, 1985a and b). At present Epstein is engaged in research in pragmatics of communication, under the title Foundations for a Grammar of Power. There are cases of scholars who interest themselves in semiotics for a period of time, and who produce something of importance in the area (Teixeira Coelho 1980), and then abandon the field. There are researchers in communication who are interested in semiotics but do not actually work in the field. In most cases the members of Intercom are connected with research in the sociology of communication; this places them in accord with the

142 Lucia Santaella Braga ideological tradition of the Left, dominant among Brazilian intellectuals. Thus they steer clear of semiotics, believing it antithetical to the stance they intend to take. Once again, this is not the place for a broader discussion of the question. Even so, everything would seem to suggest that it is in the field of communication that semiotics will tend to grow in Brazil—not only as a result of the importance of communications in this country, but because, at an institutional level, most semiotic research is being done in communication programs.

Semiotics and

Psychoanalysis

The relationship between psychoanalysis and linguistics has always been evident, above all in Lacanian psychoanalysis. With the boom of psychoanalysis in Brazil, its relationship with semiotics has recently come to be established, especially in the research of Beividas (1986, 1987), Santaella Braga (1986a, 1989a and b), Chnaiderman (1987,1989), Saporiti (1988,1989), and Chalhub (1988b, 1989). In Belo Horizonte (state of Minas Gerais), a psychoanalytical society, under the name of 'Sociedade Psicanalitica de Minas Gerais' and directed by Jarbas Portella, Leonard Joseph Davis, and Jarbas Loureiro, has formed research groups which are working on a reading of Freud in terms of Peircean semiotics. In the field of medicine in general, Lauro F.B. da Silveira is carrying out interdisciplinary studies together with medical doctors at the State University of Säo Paulo (in the interior of the state of Säo Paulo) on the application of Peircean semiotics to the diagnosis of disease.

Semiotics and Architecture

For reasons specific to the Brazilian context, it was in the field of architecture and industrial design that semiotic theories first began to be taught. This has left profound traces in the formation of architects in Brazil. The architecture and urban studies courses in most of our best universities include semiotics in the curriculum. The importance of architecture in Brazil, and its innovative tendencies, must be among the reasons for a close relationship between the two fields. The work of Pignatari in Rio de Janeiro in the 1960s has already been mentioned. From the 1970s to the present, Pignatari has been teaching in the

Semiotics in Brazil 143 School of Architecture and Urban Studies of the University of Säo Paulo, in graduate and post-graduate courses. It was there that he defended his post-doctoral dissertation on semiotics and architecture (1981). Together with Pignatari is L.D. Ferrara, who defended her post-doctoral dissertation in the same area. A. Shirley Araujo and R.N. Turin, former students of both, have been working in this area in universities in the interior of the state of Säo Paulo. Semiotician architects in the states of Paranä and Rio Grande do Norte include M.L. Piermartiri, A.I. Puppi, and Ary Rocha.

Semiotics and the Visual Arts

Those visual artists whose vocation also tends toward theoretical production form another group attracted by semiotics. A good part of those artists, whose concern extends not only to the practical production of their works, but also to the desire to carry out research of a theoretical nature, have turned to semiotics as a source of theoretical information. It is to semiotics, also, that those artists have turned who work in the intersections of the arts: music and literature, art and poetry, cinema and literature, art and new technologies, etc. Included in this category are Plaza (1986), Laurentiz (1984, 1988), Augusto (1989), and Sogabe (1990). There are also many students working at the School of Communications and Arts of the University of Säo Paulo on the semiotics of cinema and video, under the direction of E. Pefiuela-Cafiizal and Ana M. Balogh. At this point, the frontiers between art and means of communication begin to become unclear; in the research itself occurs precisely what happens in the reality of Brazil. There is in Brazil a dominant phenomenon of intersemiosis which is manifest at the intersection of areas (art and means of communication, for example), at the interchange between various cultural levels (erudite culture, popular culture, mass culture), or between fields of cultural production (TV, newspapers, and universities, for example). In short, there is a very evident intersemiotic reality in Brazil which cries out for semioticians with the capacity to study and understand it This intersemiotic reality is rooted not only in the common situations of daily life, but also in the productions of higher or learned culture. Representative of this is an extremely creative vein of Brazilian art and poetry which, due to its importance, merits a section of its own in this essay.

144 Lucia Santaella Braga Intersemiosis in Brazilian Art and Poetry Semiotic theory in Brazil has developed one of its trends from an intersemiotic practice of poetic and artistic creation . This development is so peculiar to Brazilian culture that it has its own specific features, which are not the result of influences from abroad. The semiotic practice and theory derived from this kind of creation are definitely 'made in Brazil', which makes them deserving of dissemination outside the country. This type of creation might be said to have its deepest roots in Gregörio de Matos, a baroque poet of the seventeenth century, but its most distinctive features reappeared more clearly in the work of Joaquim de Sousa Andrade, a poet of the second half of the nineteenth century. Sousandrade, as he preferred to be known, remained almost totally forgotten until 1964, when the poet-brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos wrought a near miracle of determination, compiling an edition of his work. This neglect was due to the deeply revolutionary nature of Sousändrade's poetry, in comparison with the Romanticism then officially prevailing in Brazil. His long poem Ο guesa is outstanding in this respect. It was begun in 1866, and published in its entirety in London around 1888. The de Campos brothers wrote a long, extremely detailed critical introduction to the book (1964: 3) which begins as follows: This book is intended to be a first step toward a study of Sousändrade. We have set out here to dispel the historical 'blackout' into which he was cast. Our aim is to restore to circulation some of his major poems, as a preliminary sample of the work of this poet from Maranhäo. It is not intended to be exhaustive, but enough to provide an idea of the extraordinary surprises reserved for the modern mind in the world of the singer of Ο guesa. Ο guesa is a long poem of thirteen cantos, a kind of Latin American carnivalized epic. Making use of a very synthetic language, Sousandrade creates a labyrinth of allusions and fragments of mythical, historical, literary, and Utopian quotations to mould a disturbingly lucid and parodic vision of the Americas, from preColumbian times up to the socio-political events of the late nineteenth century. Sousandrade's genius as a forerunner of the transformations through which twentieth-century literature was to pass makes him more important than a merely

Semiotics in Brazil 145 Brazilian writer. He was in fact one of the first Western poets to foresee the effects of capitalist development on human sensibility and values. The comparative study of Sousändrade's poetic diction built into the de Campos brothers' book covers a vast constellation of analogies and correspondences, ranging from Gongora and Gil Vicente to James Joyce, from Hölderlin and Novalis to Laforgue and Corbifcre, from Sä de Miranda and Dante to Ezra Pound. Along with this complex literary background, however, and closer to the intersemiotic character of his poetry, Sousändrade's poetic composition techniques point to his appropriation and incorporation of the new medium of newspapers and their graphic resources: like Mallarm6, Sousändrade was excited by the variety of the letter types to be found on the front page of any newspaper. He went still further, however, and also introduced the technique of collage into the structure of poetic language: he began by using non-hierarchical associations of elements belonging to universes from different parts of the space-time of experience, besides incorporating the technique of juxtaposition which is typical of the ideogram. All this was channeled into a prototype of the organization of narrative space-time to be used much later by film editors, with takes, shots, and flashes which move back and forth to break down the linearity of verbal discourse. But this is not all, for there is also an approximation to the world of music in Sousändrade, with his use of alliteration, paranomasia, anagrams, and vocal polyphony in the very structure of the poem. It is evident, then, that Sousändrade's poetry is intersemiotic, opening itself as it does through a whole range of appropriations of prototypical resources to other forms of organization of nonverbal languages. The making of poetry is thereby converted into a magnetic field of transpositions and incorporations of the nonverbal in the heart of the verbal, and the consequent transformation of the nature of the verbal itself. A Visual Poetics

A more recent example of this type of poetic procedure can be found in the prose and poetry of Oswald de Andrade, a member of the 1922 movement which inaugurated modernism in Brazil. Since 1924, speaking of a new poetic scale, de Andrade highlighted the interest of advertising billboards, which produce letters higher than towers. This was a way of pointing out the new ways of writing proper to the urban-industrial age. Or, as W. Benjamin put it:

146 Lucia Santaella Braga The script which had found refuge in the printed book, to which it had conveyed its autonomous destiny, found itself driven into the street, dragged out by advertising, submitted to the brutal heteronomy of economic chaos. But without any doubt, and this is not unforseeable, the development of writing will not remain ad infinitum linked to the powerful claims of a chaotic movement in science and the economy. Before this can happen, there arrives a moment at which quantity is transformed into quality, and writing, advancing ever deeper into the graphic domain of its eccentric new figuration, conquers all at once its appropriate object values. (1975: 193) In fact the restless spirit of the poets could hardly remain indifferent to this change, as they searched for deeper graphic mastery over words and for a multiplication of ways of writing which could bring the visuality of poetry to the fore. De Andrade's poetry, though not turned into a more intense exploration of typographical variations on the white background of the page, is first and foremost visual: his brief poems, consisting of flashes of thought and image, look like poetic snapshots of the sort peculiar to the urban sensibility. With his economical diction, produced by a blending of extracts from daily colloquial speech, de Andrade configures his poetic pills in a precise neural geometry which functions as a parody of the pompous rhetoric of sham erudition. His invention-novels, on the other hand, are also visual, as H. de Campos (1967: 91) has shown, using the expression 'plastic-stylistic-Cubo-Futurism' to define de Andrade's prose. De Campos describes this prose as 'reflecting the impact of Oswald's pictorial discoveries at the Paris exhibitions which were agitated by Futurism and Cubism during the early years of the century.' De Andrade's cubist style, which criticizes the standard manner of representing the world of things, proposes a new realism commensurate with the civilization of speed and machinery, the civilization that includes the cinema as its most characteristic contribution to the world of art.

A Multidisciplinary Poetics What has taken semiotic fusions to radical conclusions in Brazil has been the Concrete Poetry movement (see Solt [ed.] 1971). Far from being a pyrotechnical display of words or semi-words, non-linearly arranged on the white page, concrete

Semiotics in Brazil 147 poems arose, on the contrary, out of an attempt to return to the evolutionary view of poetry, which entails selection and elimination to extract from the poetic past the most radical artisans of the word, and on this foundation to reconstruct the path of poetry in the 'split' world of modernity. From each radical artisan, the poets who founded the concrete movement in Brazil (the brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos and D&io Pignatari) took something with which they wanted to spin a new yarn: from Mallarm6, the prismatic subdivisions of the idea; from Pound, the ideogrammic method; from Joyce, the word as ideogram, the simultaneity of spacetime precipitated by the pun; from cummings, the atomization of the word. With this material, and with the aid of the Brazilian radical poetry by Oswald de Andrade and Joäo Cabral de Melo Neto, they prepared to unleash Concrete Poetry. Concrete Poetry thus dealt face-to-face with the task of rethinking the poetic code itself, and with a broad spectrum of questions which this rethinking produced regarding techniques of composition, structuring, problems of form, of dynamic movement, isomorphism, etc. The starting point was the statement that a poem exists in a graphic space, a plastic field which sets in motion the use of typefaces in various sizes and shapes, and the positioning of printed lines, as essential elements of composition and the generation of meaning. This led to the creation of a new dynamic syntax. Operating by juxtaposition, superimposition, intraposition, and dismemberment or derivation of the designs of the signs and shapes produced, this syntax could no longer be considered from a merely linguisticgrammatical standpoint, but had to include multiple relationships between materials and significations on the page. This is how concrete poetry found in the 'Chinese model* (see H. de Campos 1977a) the ideogrammic method of composition (via Fenollosa-Pound), another type of logic which operates outside the chronological rules of verbal discursivity. Not by some coincidence, but precisely as a result of its search for analogic structures, concrete poetry enters into correspondence with forms of organization which are proper to nonverbal languages (music and the visual arts in general)—not just any kind of nonverbal language, however, but those which address a common goal (the analogic vectors of language) with a view to inventing new forms-contents. It is on this basis that concrete poetry creates the intersemiotic potential of which poetry can be the bearer. It was no accident that these poets' work led to a crisis in the traditional methods of reading and criticism, until then considered exclusively literary.

148 Lucia Santaella Braga Like any aesthetic and cultural movement in any field, the concrete poetry movement, as a movement, had a short life after its so-called orthodox phase broke out in the 1950s. Hence the programmatic movement of concrete poetry is now dead, and cannot be repeated historically except as a farce. But above and beyond the historical death of a movement, there may remain the living resistance of the creative products born during the movement, which, by a process of derivation and transformation internal to creation, continue being born even after the movement has become extinct During the last 30 years, although the concrete poets have maintained their links with the essential theses of the original movement in its aim of projecting language into an interdisciplinary, plastic, and multiple universe, their work has been outstanding in its diversity. This diversity is not just a question of the differences between one poet and another, but the variety found in the work of each one. To illustrate the scope of the issue of intersemiosis in poetry, I shall take the internal development of the poetics of Augusto de Campos, a case where the intersemiotic nature of poetry can be seen to have proceeded to radical conclusions. Keeping pace in his poetic writing with the very mutation of the graphic and visual means of language production with which the new technologies challenge the artist, each of de Campos's works not only refashions into new forms the poetic code with which he operates, but includes in this process a transformation in the productive apparatus of poetry itself.

Phono-Graphy in Space In the essay mentioned above, where Benjamin (1975:194) unveils the importance of the new figurations in Mallarm6's graphics for a revolution in the traditional form of printed books, he also remarks: The typewriter will take the pen out of the hands of the literati, when the exactitude of typographical forms is immediately introduced into the conception of their books. We may suppose that new systems will then make themselves necessary, with more variable forms of script. These systems will put the muscles of controlling fingers in the place of the cursive hand of habitual writing.

Semiotics in Brazil 149 Now with the advent of video poems and Videotext poems it is astonishing to realize the extent to which this prophecy of Benjamin's has come true. It was in this way that the poets most sensitive to the material concretion of the new forms of writing and visual figuration could overcome the limits imposed by the typewriter. From this viewpoint, the creative trajectory of A. de Campos appears to be exemplary. In a newspaper interview (Santaella Braga 1986b: 68-69), de Campos shows how alert and tuned in he has always been to changes in the technical means of language production: For many years I've thought of poetry in terms which today would be called 'intersemiotic' or 'intermedia'. In the introduction to Poetamenos, as long ago as 1953, when I was 22,1 referred to 'neon signs' and 'filmletters' for my poems. My intense exchange with Concrete painters in Säo Paulo, especially Fiaminghi, led to my poster poems of 1956, and to poem-books with new graphic and visual structures. We were more and more eager to deepen the intersection between poets and visual artists, although we worked in ever greater isolation, and laid out our own poems and books ourselves. In 1964 dissatisfaction with typographical limitations, which were more of an economic than a technical problem, led me to work with headlines and letters clipped from newspapers and magazines. At least I had a colossal shop at my disposal, with all the letters in the world in it. But the results were technically poor. Shortly afterwards, I used 'photoletters' with which I composed some of my poems. Letterset was set up in Brazil around 1968. I learned to use this type of script, and began composing with it. The medium changes the message. The Concrete poems of the 'historical' phase were written in a typewriter. But now it has become easier to play with the design of the letters. I was also engrossed in ideas for changing the format of books, and dismantling their structure. Unbinding them. Then I began drawing the letters myself. In 1968 I met Julio Plaza. My meeting with Plaza was the most important event in recent years as far as my poetic production is concerned. Julio Plaza is a Spanish artist who has lived in Brazil since 1969. It is worth mentioning that the meeting between Campos and Plaza does not seem to have been the outcome of chance circumstances, but the effect of a conjunction of

150 Lucia Santaella Braga complementary creative tendencies. First, because Plaza, who began as a graphic and visual artist but has an interdisciplinary vocation, has never reduced his work to a single exclusive medium or support On the contrary, aware of the 'tradition of rupture' central to modernism, he has always faced with radical solutions the plurality of fields and materials with which today's world challenges the artist. Secondly, the same Eastern detachment, depuration, extreme conciseness, laconicism bordering on silence, and achievement of maximum effects with minimum means presented by Plaza in his confrontations with planes and spaces is also found in Campos, in his poetic search for the marrow of language. The paths of the two crossed in 1968, not by coincidence but by the magnetic force of 'elective affinity'. Plaza was preparing his book Objetos. Two superimposed sheets of paper, creating a deliberate interplay of cross-sections and folds, projected three-dimensional forms which were at once geometric and organic. A series of these, printed by a silk-screen process, and combining the three primary colors, made up a book comprising page-objects which leaped out of the flat surface to open up into space. Plaza asked de Campos to write a critical introduction to this strange book. De Campos gave the only foreseeable reply: instead of a text, he wanted to make a journey inside the creation itself. For him, words are also plastic, sensitive bodies. The support Plaza offered him (planes, space, sculpture, color, shades, movement, and light) permitted the mobile insertion of word bodies into the play of pure and multiple qualities. The first Poemobile was thus born and included in Objetos, the book by Plaza, published in 1969. This meeting between de Campos and Plaza was above all a revelation of aesthetic harmony in their modes of conceiving of creation. It functioned as a magnetic pole stimulating the production of distinctly intersemiotic works (books breaking their bonds) such as Poemobiles and Caixa Preta (Black Box). As far as Poemobiles is concerned, it is sufficient to say that the work consists of threedimensional mobile and multiple object-poems, born of a prescience that hologrammic poetry would one day be a possibility, as it is now. As for Caixa Preta, a book-which-is-not-a-book, dismantled and unbound, it frees poetics from the forms of urban-industrial visuality to fly toward the pulsating lights and movements of a post-industrial electronic poetry. Since 1976, de Campos has continued on his voyage of no return, and has persisted in following the vector of amplifying the sign by means of semiotic-vocal-visual or phono-graphic complexity. This is why his poems present genuine invitations to re-creation for artists committed to inventing forms in the field of music. Moreover, the intersemiotic character radi-

Semiotics in Brazil 151 calized by concrete poetry did not remain limited to the production of the poets who founded the movement, but put down roots, reverberating in the works of artists and poets who seek creation at the crossroads of the visual-verbal, verbalmusical, and visual-musical. On the other hand, many procedures engendered by concrete poetry have increasingly been incorporated into a wide variety of types of cultural production, from the day-to-day visuality of newspaper layout and headlines, publicity writing, and visual programming of books to radio jingles, graphic TV mobiles, and popular lyrics.

A Plurivocal Art

For the purpose of intersemiosis, however, it is the path of Plaza that must now be highlighted. Plaza's transforming and critical intervention in the traditional media of art production, and the opening up of niches for creation in the electronic media, have led him to an original, highly peculiar conception of intermedia, intercode art. This conception has not been reduced to the level of the mere idea, but was born in fact from a plurality of creations intended as translations, which ended up giving rise to a theory of intersemiotic translation. In actual fact, there was an interweaving of theory and practice, as Plaza's translation work awakened in him the need for a theory, while at the same time a theory began arising out of the search for a way to illuminate his practice. The outcome of this process was an exhibition, 'Transcriar' (September 1985, in Säo Paulo), which included work by Plaza and other artists engaged in creating at the interstices of translation. Connected to a certain extent with Plaza's work are Philadelpho Menezes's poetic and theoretical activities. Interested primarily in visuality and intersemiosis in poetry, Menezes organized an exhibition called 'Poesia Intersignos' (Intersignic Poetry) in December 1985, in Säo Paulo. In 1987 he defended a master's thesis at Säo Paulo Catholic University on the visual character of Brazilian Modem Poetry; this work was published in 1989. In 1988, he organized in Säo Paulo a huge International Visual Poetry Exhibition; and for his doctoral dissertation Menezes is presently researching visual poetry in the context of post-modernity. Also connected with intersemiosis between poetry and art was an exhibition called 'Palavra Imägica' (Imagic Word), organized in Säo Paulo by Betty Lerner. But there are still other aspects in Plaza's work that are important for the intersemiotic vein in Brazilian art.

152 Lucia Santaella Braga Since 1980, starting with a selection of poems which already showed an evident intersemiotic modus operandi, Plaza has been undertaking graphic-visual translations which give an epidermic configuration of visuality to the nonverbal dimension implicitly contained in the original poems (see Plaza 1981). They are in fact 'transcreations' which reveal the form-content of the poems in compressions visible at an instantaneous glance. These translating procedures did not arise in Plaza as the outcome of a sudden chance occurrence or a self-imposed task. On the contrary, they had already begun to crop up as part of his own artistic work. Plaza's familiarity with media other than those which are strictly graphic led him to further translation work, using mechanical and industrial media as a support (photography and cinema). This can be seen in his translations of haikus using photomontage, and in translations of the cosmic map from I Ching into a diagram of the sky, with unusual contortions and punctuations of the camera, in his film Luzazul (see Plaza 1987: 99-204). It was but a short step from these translations to others using post-industrial media (electronic panel and video-text). It was no accident that in December 1982, even before the video-text system was introduced in Brazil, Plaza held an exhibition of video-text art, including his own work and works by other artists and poets excited by the idea of creating forms of perception and sensibility through the exploration of this new graphic form, with its diagrammatic figuration of movements of color and light. The same exhibition was transposed to the 1983 Säo Paulo Biennale, with the addition of works by other artists. It is easily seen that this conception of art as translation, generated in the transition between various media, from handmade to post-industrial, sets up a dynamic of playful confrontation and lucid conflict revealing the potential and the boundaries of the opportunities for invention in each medium and for the means of invention which arise out of the unpredictability of the interstices between them. Only one more step was needed to move from this practice of thought-creation to a theory of intersemiotic translation. But yet another intersection occurred at this point

Semiotics of Translation For some twenty years now, Haroldo de Campos has been engaged in the practice and theoretical construction of poetic translation (see H. de Campos 1967, 1969, 1975, 1976, 1977a and b, 1981). For de Campos, who follows Benjamin (1979)

Semiotics in Brazil 1S3 in seeing translation as form, the more difficult (or impossible) it seems to translate a poem, the greater the challenge to the translator to invent. Thus, translation is always recreation or parallel creation, autonomous but reciprocal. There is therefore an intersemiotic postulate built into poetic translation, under the sign of invention. To ensure that poetic translation is not, in Benjamin's words, 'the imprecise transmission of unessential content', de Campos shows that poetic translation must go beyond merely linguistic cleverness, and must be based on the criterion of translating the form—that is, 'transcreating'. Some of de Campos's former students have been applying his theories to a number of poets, and interesting works are being produced (see, for instance, Vera M. de Campos 1988). Plaza is also deeply familiar with de Campos's theory, extracted from the experience of his own practice of poetic translation. From de Campos's theory, Plaza has taken over some basic assumptions and has extended them to other dimensions, as required by his activity as translator between various media, codes, and languages. In the search for a way to clarify the increasingly intersemiotic nature of the arts, especially since the mid-nineteenth century, it is in the process of interaction, interference, integration, blending, and reflux of languages that Plaza finds the germ of intersemiotic translation. He therefore starts to focus his thinking about the phenomenon from the angle of C.S. Peirce's general doctrine of signs. The most original feature of Plaza's work, however, is his own peculiar mode of appropriating Peirce's theory, which is a diagrammatic mode. Far from functioning as a reduction which limits the ambiguity of the phenomena under examination, the theoretical foundation is used, on the contrary, as a compass to guide the translator's vision from its macro-level (translation as thought in signs, as the intercourse of senses, and as transcreation of forms) to the microscopic levels of the transit between signs and the signs operations which go on inside the act of translation itself. Based on Peirce, Plaza postulates that all the multiplicity and enormous variety of languages, supports, media, and channels are in fact mere extensions grounded in no more than three grand sign matrices (icon, index, symbol) which enter into correspondence with the human senses to produce aural, visual and verbal languages (see Santaella Braga 1988). This enables Plaza to free himself from the fetishism and mystification of the media, and to see translation in terms of the levels of inventiveness of the signs set in motion by the act of translating. It is therefore not the a priori selection or the initial privilege of a medium or language

154 Lucia Santaella Braga that will define the degree of creative quality in a translation, but the 'transcreation of forms', the reinvention of a form to produce an analogous aesthetic effect in a different medium. I shall not dwell in detail here on the implications of intersemiotic translation with regard to the past, which Plaza has formulated in the light of Benjamin's concept of history; one brief reference will have to suffice. Since translation is an act of choosing in relation to the past (remote or recent), it is also an act of reconfiguring time. Through translation, the past re-emerges not as a dead or senseless memory of what is over and done with, but as the living force of what may still come into being as a spark. As to the relation between intersemiotic translation and the future, the geometric progression with which media and signs are growing and multiplying provides a glimpse of the fact that surviving and translating are probably becoming more and more synonymous—at least in Brazil this statement makes sense and sounds true. Besides Plaza's work, there is a large group of students at the University of Säo Paulo working on the translation of literary works into movies or television novels. Under the direction of Ana M. Balogh, their research and also practical works are based on the narrative models extracted from the texts of the Paris School of Semiotics. Interest in the field of intersemiotic translation involving all kinds of arts (poetry, video, music, theater, television, etc.) seems to be growing in Brazil—one more datum in favor of my argument concerning the intersemiotic nature of Brazilian culture.

Semiotics in the Curricula The weight of tradition has never been very great in Brazil. This is also true for the curricula at the universities. It has never been a difficult enterprise to introduce new disciplines or to found new courses at both the graduate and the post-graduate levels. I have pointed already to the Brazilian disposition and openness toward everything that is new and unknown. There is certainly a negative side to this, but there are also positive aspects involved. Semiotics is a good example of the healthy advantages of the Brazilian flexibility. Semiotics is spread throughout Brazil as a discipline in the curricula of many different graduate and post-graduate courses. To give an idea, here follows an incomplete list of courses and universities where semiotics appears (the list is incomplete because it is restricted to the

Semiotics in Brazil 155 universities which are connected with the Brazilian Semiotic Society). At the Rio Grande do Norte Federal University, where F. Ivan da Silva (1988), M.L. Garcia, and the architect Ary Rocha teach, semiotics is part of the curriculum of the graduate School of Letters and Literature and of the School of Architecture. In Porto Alegre, State of Rio Grande do Sul, semiotics is included in the curricula of three different universities in schools of Literature and Linguistics, Architecture, and Communication. It has recently been included in the curriculum of the post-graduate course in Languages and Literatures, under the direction of professors Elizabeth B.Duarte (1989) and M. da Gra?a Krieger (1990). In the State of Paranä, semiotics also appears in the curricula of three different universities, in the Schools of Art, Architecture, Communication, and Letters, under the auspices of, respectively, Alberto I. Puppi, M.L. Piermartiri, and Denise A.D. Guimaräes. In Rio de Janeiro it is included in the curricula of two different universities at the graduate and post-graduate levels. Milton J. Pinto, Aluizio R. Trinta, Luis Felipe Ribeiro, and Monica Rector have been teaching the disciplines connected with semiotics for the last ten years. In Belo Horizonte, at the Minas Gerais Federal University, the Department of Letters has recently been divided into two departments: one of Linguistics and the other of Comparative Literature and Semiotics. The chair of this department is Julio Pinto, who is now advising dissertations in this area in Minas Gerais. But the greatest concentration of semiotic studies is in Säo Paulo. In the Interior of the State of Säo Paulo, at the State University of Säo Paulo, the group of semioticians connected with the Center for Semiotic Studies have been teaching courses on semiotics for more than ten years. In the city of Säo Paulo, at the University of Säo Paulo, semiotics is a discipline in the graduate and post-graduate courses of the School of Architecture. D. Pignatari and L.D. Ferrara have been teaching there since 1975. Also at the University of Säo Paulo, for the last ten years, semiotics has been a discipline in both the graduate and post-graduate courses of Linguistics. A good number of dissertations on semiotics and linguistics have been defended there, under the direction of C.T. Pais. Semiotics is also a discipline in other graduate and post-graduate courses in the area of Humanities at the University of Säo Paulo, under the direction of D.L. Pessoa de Barros and L. Fiorin. But the biggest concentration of semiotic disciplines can be found at the School of Communications and Arts at the University of Säo Paulo: Semiotics of the Image, Semiotics of Representation in Television, and Semiotics of the Cinema in the graduate courses; Nonverbal Systems of Signs, Poetics of Visual

1S6 Lucia Santaella Braga Intertextuality, From Literature to TV and Video, Semiotics of Film Sequences, and Semiotics of Creative Translation, under the direction of E.Pefluela-Caflizal, A.M. Balogh, J.L. Cagnin, and Julio Plaza in the post-graduate program. The lines of research in semiotics developed in their post-graduate courses are: Systems of Meaning in Multimedia, and Nonverbal Systems of Signs. A new experience was introduced at the Catholic University of Säo Paulo. As it has so far been well-received, it may be appropriate to describe it in some detail. While in other post-graduate programs semiotics constitutes only one of the disciplines, in this program it is the very spinal cord of the curricular structure. The program was born in 1978 from a previous post-graduate program in Literary Theory which had been founded in 1969 by L.D. Ferrara. In 1971, H. de Campos and D. Pignatari were invited to be Faculty members. In 1976, L. Santaella Braga, a former student of the program, was also invited to join the Faculty. In 1983, the same happened to Fernando Segolin and Samira Chalhub. For more than ten years, H. de Campos was responsible for research on Semiotics of Literature, Pignatari on Semiotics and Communication and L.D. Ferrara on Semiotics and Methodology. After 1985, the three of them retired, L. Santaella Braga became the chair, and a group of young professors—some of the program's most outstanding graduates—were invited to teach in the program and advise the students' research toward their master's and doctoral degrees. In the curricula and research activities of this program, Semiotics is the main source from which the lines of research are directed. That is, studies are diversified and interdisciplinary (intersemiotics, intermedia), or the source and the product are plural, but the irradiating focus which determines these studies is based on semiotic theories. It is precisely this that has engendered the program's synthetic coherence and readiness to explore new fields of action, when the means of communication form new conjunctions—for example, cinema and video, means of print and video (videotext), music and electronic means, holographs and poetry, computer graphics and arts, etc. In summary, to the extent that semiotics develops as a science capable of laying the foundation for the reading and critical analysis of all and any signic process, in its constitution as a process of communication, the means of communication and the culture in which these signs take shape, the intersections and exchanges of means for generating new forms of signs and the sociocultural intercourse of messages in their political and ideological implications can be coherently integrated in the light of semiotic theories.

Semiotics in Brazil 157 Hence, far from leading to dispersion, the diversities of communicational phenomena embraced by research in the program are synthetically reintegrated in semiotically common foci which permit the visualization of the unity of the diversity. The program has structured its lines of research in four streams of orientation: (1) Intersemiotic Systems—codification and decodification; (2) Literature and Intertextuality; (3) Signs and Ideology; and (4) Signs and Education. Recently, two of these lines were re-structured: Signs and Ideology has now been designated Semiotics of Culture, because Signs and Ideology falls within a larger field of investigation dealing with anthropological and social determinations of cultural production (seen in this program as the production of signs), since cultural phenomena only function culturally because they too are phenomena of communication which, in turn, are capable of communicating because they are structured in signs. The recent incorporation into the program of Norval Baitello (1987), who earned his Ph.D. in Semiotics of Culture in Germany, provides sufficient support to attend to a pressing need to expand studies of ideology, integrating them into the cultural dimension. As for the line of research on Signs and Education, since all dissertations in this Held are always directed to the interference of the means of communication and to the role of the intersection of systems of signs (verbal and nonverbal) in the teaching-learning processes, this research is more correctly inserted in Intersemiotic Systems and in Literature and Intertextuality. In this way, the line of research on Education was replaced by a line of research now emerging in the program which deals with the interconnections between Semiotics and Psychoanalysis—that is, the ways in which the self is implicated in the language. Since psychoanalysis is already a true semiotic of the effects which language and desire exert on the self, this line of research enriches the program by incorporating into the functioning of the signs the questioning of the self (with all the radical consequences which psychoanalysis implies for this question). For this emerging area of investigation, the program also finds support in the research of Samira Chalhub. The research lines on Intersemiotic Systems and Literature and Intertextuality remain unaltered. In the former, Arlindo Machado (1985, 1988) and L. Santaella Braga, as well as Silvia Anspach (1987), are more directly involved; in the latter, Amälio Pinheiro (1983, 1986), Fernando Segolin (1983), and Olga de Sä (1979, 1984). The line of research on Intersemiotic Systems is understood on three levels, moving from the broadest to the most specific. The first level deals with

1S8 Lucia Santaella Braga the relation of semiotics to other fields of knowledge—that is, semiotics and other sciences. The addition to the program of Ana M.A. Goldfarb (1987), a specialist in History and Philosophy of Science, provides support for the development of this area of investigation, with special attention on the problematics of Semiotics and Epistemology. On the second level, Intersemiotic Systems cover the relations among diverse systems of signs—that is, intersections amongst languages and sign systems such as cinema and video, music and cinema, newspapers and television, etc. On a third level, more specific, monographic studies on a specific system of signs are dealt with—that is, studies on the communication processes, the modes of production, reception, and consumption of messages within a system of signs (cinema, video, or newspaper, for example). Literature and Intertextuality also encompass four levels: (1) theory of literature; (2) comparative literature—parody, dialogism, the mixing of genders and translation; (3) literature related to close series (in connection with Semiotics of Culture); and (4) literature and nonverbal signs (in connection with Intersemiotic Systems). These are, in synthesis, the trends which have guided the lines of investigation of the post-graduate program in Communication and Semiotics at Säo Paulo Catholic University. Since the program began in 1978 with a transformation of the Literary Theory program, it understandably went through a transition process of several years, in which communication and semiotics were still affected by roots in literature. At present, however, a great effort is being made to allow the program to assume its semiotic destiny more integrally. To this effect, both the faculty and the content of the disciplines have sought an amplification in order to attend more fully to the diversity intrinsic to the program. In this way, neither the curricular structure nor the intellectual background of the faculty can tolerate the redundancy, in order to fulfill what seems to be the defining profile of this program: the minimum in the multiple. A brief panorama of the curricular organization should make this clearer. The curricular structure is organized around two nuclei. The first nucleus is composed of the three fundamental disciplines (General Semiotics, Theory of Communication, and Social Semiotics), which constitute a kind of sustaining pillar of the program. The program receives students from the most diverse areas, since the problems of communication and of semiotics are not restrictive, by their nature invading the most diverse fields and areas. Its specificity lies in the charac-

Semiotics in Brazil 159 terization of the functioning of any process of sign as a process where sense or meaning are produced, wherever this may be. In this way, the function of the first nucleus is to develop basic concepts (1) of the functioning of the most varied types of signs (General Semiotics); (2) of the processes of communication characteristic of the means and channels in which these signs are diffused (Theory of Communication); and (3) of the social intercourse of messages in their ideological and political implications (Social Semiotics). This nucleus is therefore the first step, at which students from diverse areas receive the conceptual foundations needed in creating a field of investigation which is common to all despite the diversity of each one's educational background. This nucleus is also eliminatory—that is, it is a nucleus to filter those students who are really able and wish to continue on the path of research toward a thesis (master's degree) and a dissertation (Ph.D. degree). The second nucleus, on the other hand, although also obligatory, is more open and more specific. The students set up their curriculum and choose the disciplines in accordance with the needs of their specific research. The disciplines offered in this nucleus are four: Semiotics of Literature 1 and 2, and Intersemiotic Systems 1 and 2. The program contents of these disciplines are, however, variable, with only the following restrictions: Semiotics of Literature must be directed toward questions of poetry in 1, and toward prose in 2; while the Intersemiotic Systems must be directed, in 1, toward the interdisciplinary connections of semiotics, and in 2, toward the nonverbal sign systems. Furthermore, the students have the possibility of substituting, when their research should demand this, two of the disciplines of the second nucleus for the disciplines presented in other post-graduate courses in the University itself or in other universities. As a consequence, many of the students take some disciplines at the School of Communications and Arts at the University of Säo Paulo, which has resulted in a very fruitful exchange. After 50 percent of the credits have been completed, the students follow the research nucleus course, where questions of science and method are discussed and developed, as well as methods and results. This structure has allowed us to unite, in a quite satisfactory way, two conditions which appear fundamental to us when dealing with such a wide and diversified field as semiotics and its communication processes: on the one hand, the scientific and conceptual preparation/formation in communication and semiotics, common to all students; and on the other hand, the increasing specialization and gradual tendency toward the themes selected by each for his (her) thesis. This has permitted the not often easy, but always enriching

160 Lucia Santaella Braga experience of bringing students of the most diverse fields of knowledge, from literature to geology, from the arts to mathematics, from music to mass communication. Counting on a faculty that has always included about ten professors since its conversion to Communication and Semiotics in 1978, 57 master's theses and 19 Ph.D. dissertations have been defended in the program.2 At present there are more than 200 students enrolled in the program, of which 80 are writing their master's theses and 20 their dissertations. In the next two years the faculty will be engaged in the transformation of the curricular structure in order to attend to emergent and recent needs: for instance, there is an increasing number of students interested, on one hand, in the semiotics of technical images, and on the other hand, in the semiotics of music. What can be advanced about the new curriculum is that, besides expanding the number of faculty members, it will be organized around three interconnected centers of research: (1) on visual means; (2) on musical signs; and (3) on literature and verbal language in general. As the latter has always existed in the program, recently a center for visual signs has been founded, and is now under the direction of Arlindo Machado. In two years' time, we expect to have the necessary infrastructure to found the musical center. Only then can we hope to fulfill the intersemiotic ideal this program has been trying to attain since its birth.

Brazilian

Semiotic

Society

Besides the Brazilian Semiotic Society, about which I shall give some information further on, there is, in Brazil, the Center for Semiotic Studies, which was founded in 1973, and from 1973 to 1986 was called the A.J. Greimas Center for Semiotic Studies. Its seeds were planted at the end of the 1960s when Pefiuela-Cafiizal and E. Lopes were together at the department of Spanish at the University of Säo Paulo. There they founded the journal Clavileno, which published articles based on semiological sources rooted in Saussure, Hjelmslev, Barthes, and the 'groupe Mu' from Lifcge. In 1969, both moved from Säo Paulo, accepting the invitation to teach in the interior of the State of Säo Paulo: Lopes in Ribeiräo Preto, and Caflizal in S.J. do Rio Preto. There they began to work with A. Dias Lima, I. Assis da Silva, and T. Miyasaki. The idea of creating a group of research on semiology ended up in the

Semiotics in Brazil 161 creation of a journal, BACAB-Semiological Studies, which was the first practical result of their project. In 1973, invited by this group, A J . Greimas came to Brazil to give a course in the interior of the State of Säo Paulo. The course was a great success, and after it the A.J. Greimas Center for Semiotic Studies was founded. At the same time, BACAB-Semiological Studies expanded into a more ambitious journal called Significagäo. Caflizal moved then to the School of Communications and Arts at the University of Säo Paulo, where he began developing and spreading semiological research. In 1978, the State University of Säo Paulo was founded, and part of the group of professors moved to Araraquara, another city in the interior of the State of Säo Paulo, where a post-graduate course in Letters with a primary line of research on semiotics was founded. Since 1978 the Center has been located in Araraquara, and several of its members are spread in neighboring cities and colleges which form the complex of the State University of Säo Paulo. The Center divides its activities among (1) post-graduate courses, (2) regular seminars and colloquia, and (3) research and publications. In the last ten years, the semiological frontiers have been gradually enlarged, and interdisciplinary studies have been established with the departments of Anthropology and Social Sciences. Psychoanalysis, communications, and arts are studied from a semiotic perspective. The scientific production of the members of the Center, including books, articles, theses, and dissertations, comes today to almost 300 titles. The Brazilian Semiotic Society (ABS), which is connected with the IASS and the Semiotic Society of America, was founded in Säo Paulo in April of 1974. It was founded by D. Pignatari and a group of professors who were engaged in semiotic research in the country. Pignatari was the president of the ABS from 1974 to 1982. The structure of the ABS is decentralized, divided into regional sections. When we speak about Brazil, it must be understood that there is not only one Brazil, as it were. This is a country of differences; and these differences are not only ideological, but also material. Different stages of development exist side by side in Brazil. Pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial forms of production combine in a peculiar texture of mixed time and space. A conscious effort to decentralize the hegemony the South of Brazil exerts over the other regions led the founders of the ABS to create a new kind of structure. In it the National Society is only a committee, a directory comprising seven members from different regions of Brazil.

162 Lucia Santaella Braga Hence, the National Society is embodied in the Federate or Regional Associations. In one sense this has been an interesting structure, because the Regional Associations have a degree of autonomy that generates a sense of enthusiasm toward the development of semiotics in each region; in another sense, however, this structure weakens the National Society, whose existence comes to be exclusively political and formal. Since 1974, seven Regional Semiotic Associations have been founded in Brazil, in the following sequence: (1) 1974—Rio de Janeiro, founded by M. Rector, and currently presided over by Milton J. Pinto; (2) 1977—Säo Paulo, founded by L. Santaella Braga, and now headed by Conrado Paschoale; (3) 1981—Rio Grande do Norte, founded by M.L. Garcia, who is still its president; (4) 1981—Paraiba, founded by Elizabeth Marinheiro, who is still its president; (5) 1982—Paranä, founded by M.L. Piermartiri, now under A.I. Puppi; (6) 1985—Rio Grande do Sul, founded by Elizabeth Duarte, M. da Gra9a Krieger, and lone Bentz, and now presided over by E. Duarte; and (7) 1985—Brasilia, founded by Hildo Η. do Couto, who is still its president. Since its foundation in 1974, the ABS has, through its Regional Associations, been promoting some important events. In 1978, M. Rector organized the First Brazilian Semiotic Colloquium in Rio de Janeiro. This was a very important and pioneering event with an international profile which had as its main lecturer Thomas A. Sebeok. In 1980, Rector organized the Second Brazilian Semiotic Colloquium, and in 1984 she organized the First Portuguese-Brazilian Colloquium, both in Rio de Janeiro. In 1982, M.L. Piermartiri organized in Curitiba (State of Paranä) the First Brazilian Semiotic Congress. During the Congress, L. Santaella Braga was elected president of the Brazilian Semiotic Society, replacing Pignatari. In 1985 the Second Brazilian Semiotic Congress, also with a broad international profile, was held in Säo Paulo, organized by A.C. de Oliveira, L. Santaella Braga, D.L. Pessoa de Barros, and C.T. Pais. During the Congress, L. Santaella Braga was re-elected president of the ABS. In 1985, Norma Tasca (president of the Portuguese Semiotic Society) organized the Second PortugueseBrazilian Colloquium in Porto. In 1986, Olivia Barradas organized the Third Brazilian Semiotic Colloquium in Salvador (Bahia). The Third Brazilian Semiotic Congress is now being organized by E. Duarte and M. da Gra?a Krieger. It will be held in Porto Alegre (State of Rio Grande do Sul) in August 1990. Besides these nationwide events, each Regional Association promotes other sorts of events—seminars, workshops, courses, etc. The most active and regular

Semiotics in Brazil 163 Regional Association is, without doubt, the one in Rio Grande do Sul. Since its foundation in 1985, it has regularly promoted national seminars with an interdisciplinary character. Several semioticians from abroad or from Säo Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have been invited to give lectures in recent years. From 1984 to 1986, the ABS-Paranä was also very active, promoting an event each year. These events were called Semiotic Week 1, 2, and 3 respectively. Since 1987, however, the Paranä association has stopped its activities, mostly as a result of the lack of disposition of the persons who are part of the new directorate. This is a very common phenomenon in Brazil: the Institutions are always very weak, and everything depends on the initiative of individuals. ABS-Säo Paulo is another example of irregular rhythm of activities. Some years ago it used to promote frequent lectures and work-shops; then it remained silent for some years. It was only recently that, through the initiative of A.C. de Oliveira (1987, 1989) and A.M. Zilocchi (1987), the Association came back to life again with an extensive program of activities including lectures, workshops, and courses. The ABSRio de Janeiro, which used to be very active, has not been heard from since 1985.

Publications Besides the books published by Brazilian semioticians which were cited in this essay, there are three introductory books in semiotics which should be mentioned: Rector (1978), L. Santaella Braga (1983), and H.H. do Couto (1983). Proceedings of some of the events mentioned above were also published: Rector (ed.) (1983), Rector (ed.) (1986), and A.C. de Oliveira and L. Santaella (eds.) (1987a, b, and c). In 1981, L. Santaella Braga was invited to edit a special issue of Dispositio, Revista Hispanica de Semiotica Literaria on Semiotics and Poetics in Brazil. The issue was available to English readers through the Department of Romance Languages of the University of Michigan. There are a number of semiotic journals in Brazil: (1) Significagäo, published by the Center for Semiotic Studies; (2) Acta Semiotica et Linguistica, which belongs to the Brazilian Society of Professors of Linguistics and is edited by C.T. Pais; and (3) Face, under the auspices of the post-graduate program in Communication and Semiotics at Säo Paulo Catholic University, and edited by L. Santaella Braga. There is also a small journal from the ABS-Rio Grande do Sul called Linguagens, a very nice and well-conceived publication. At the Minas Gerais

164 Lucia Santaella Braga Federal University, in Belo Horizonte, a journal has been published since 1978 under the title Ensaios de Semiotica by the erstwhile Department of Linguistics and Literature. The recent division of this department into two (Comparative Literature and Semiotics on one side, and Linguistics on the other) may bring some changes to the journal. Perspectives for the Future It is not my intention to make prophecies, but everything would seem to indicate that semiotics in Brazil is here to stay and to grow. This is probably due to the fact that the semiotic spirit, in its intersemiotic as well as in its post-modern sense, seems to have been bom in Brazil. Semioticians elsewhere in the world will have the opportunity to perceive this and grant that I am right when they begin to pay attention to the lights of Brazilian culture, which, regrettably, are at present hidden, heavily curtained by the shameful economic and political crisis which has been crippling the country. Notes 1.

2.

A graduate course in Brazil corresponds to what is called undergraduate in the United States. Hence post-graduate corresponds to the American graduate course. As this essay refers to the Brazilian educational system, the terminology chosen was the one current in Brazil. Some of the dissertations produced at the universities are published, but the great majority, despite their good quality, are not. This is a result of the highly commercial logic which rules Brazilian publishing houses. In most cases, scholars can only begin to publish when their names are (at least to a certain extent) known in the editorial market. On the other hand, the university presses are poor and cannot handle the publication of what the universities produce.

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166 Lucia Santaella Braga Benjamin, Walter 1975 Revisor de livros juramentados. In Mallarmi (Signos), Haroldo de Campos, Augusto de Campos, and D6cio Pignatari (eds.), 193-94. Säo Paulo: Perspectiva. 1979 A tarefa do tradutor. Revista Humboldt 40, 38-44. Bense, Max 1971 Pequena estitica (Debates), trans, by I. Dormien and J. Guinsburg; Haroldo de Campos (ed.). Säo Paulo: Perspectiva. Benveniste, Emile 1976 Ο homem na linguagem (Präticas de Leitura), trans, by M.L. Pascoal. Lisbon: Arcädia. Bemardini, Aurora 1987 Ο orgänico e ο patitico em Eisenstein. In Semiötica da comunicagäo e outras ciencias (Cademos PUC 30), Ana C. Oliveira and L. Santaella (eds.), 53-65. Säo Paulo: EDUC. Blikstein, Isidore 1983 Kaspar Hauser e α fabricagäo da reaüdade. Säo Paulo: Cultrix. Buyssens, Eric 1972 Semiologia e comunicagäo lingüistica, trans, by I. Blikstein. Säo Paulo: Cultrix. Cämara, J. Mattoso 1942 Principios de lingüistica geral. Rio de Janeiro: F. Briguiet. 1953 Para ο estudo da fonemica portuguesa. Rio de Janeiro: Organizagöes Simöes. 1954 Principios de lingüistica geral, second edition. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria AcadSmica. 1956 Cronica lingüistica: Roman Jakobson. Revista Brasileira de Filologia 2 (1), 55-64. Campos, Augusto de 1953 Poetamenos. Säo Paulo: Edigäo do Autor. Campos, A. de and Campos, H. de 1964 Re-Visäo de Sousändrade. Säo Paulo: Edisöes Inven^äo. Campos, A. de, Campos, H. de, and Schnaiderman, B. 1968 Poesia russa moderna. Rio de Janeiro: Civiliza^äo Brasileira. Campos, A. de and Plaza, Julio 1974 Poemobiles. Säo Paulo: Edig;öes de Autor.

Semiotics in Brazil 167 1975 Caixa preta. Säo Paulo: Edi?öes de Autor. Campos, Harolde de 1967 Metalinguagem. Petröpolis: Vozes. 1969 A arte no horizonte do provdvel (Debates). Säo Paulo: Perspective. 1973 Morfologia de Macunaima (Estudos). Säo Paulo: Perspective 1975 Dante Alighieri: 6 cantos do paraiso. Rio de Janeiro: Fontana. 1976 Α operaQäo do texto (Debates). Säo Paulo: Perspective. 1977a Ideograma, anagrama, diagrama: Uma leitura de Fenollosa. In Ideograma, H. de Campos (ed.), 11-113. Säo Paulo: Cultrix. 1977b Ruptura dos generös na literatura latino-americana (Elos). Säo Paulo: Perspective. 1978 Structuralism and semiotics in Brazil: Retrospect, prospect. Dispositio-Revista Hispanica de Semiotica Literaria 7/8 (3), 175-87. 1981 Deus e ο Diabo no Fausto de Goethe (Signos). Säo Paulo: Perspectiva. Campos, Vera M. de 1988 Borges e Guimaräes na esquina rosada do Grande sertäo (Debates). Säo Paulo: Perspectiva. Cändido, Antonio 1965 Literatura e sociedade. Säo Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional. 1970 Dialdtica da Malandragem. Revista do Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros 8, 67-89. Carvalhal, T. Franco et al. (eds.) 1974 Masculino.feminino e neutro, ensaios de semiötica narrativa, trans, by T. Franco Carvalhal et al. Porto Alegre: Globo." Chabrol, Claude (ed.) 1977 Semiötica narrativa e textual, trans, by L. Perrone-Moisis. Säo Paulo: Cultrix. Chalhub, Samira 1987 As fungöes da linguagem (Principios). Säo Paulo: Atica. 1988a Metalinguagem (Principios). Säo Paulo: Atica. 1988b Bloco mägico: Psicanälise e linguagem. Face 1 (1), 39-46. 1989 Ο logro do Gozo. Face 2 (2), in press. Chnaiderman, Miriam 1987 Psicanälise e literatura. Unpublished thesis, Säo Paulo Catholic University. 1989 Ensaios de semiotica e psicanälise. Säo Paulo: Escuta.

168 Lucia Santaella Braga Costa Lima, L. 1973 Estruturalismo e teoria literäria. Petröpolis: Vozes. Coutinho, Afranio 1953 Correntes cruzadas. Rio de Janeiro: Ed. A Noite. 1954 Por uma critica estdtica. Rio de Janeiro: Minist&io da Educagäo e Culture. 1957 Da critica e da nova critica. Rio de Janeiro: Civilizafäo Brasileira. 1968 Critica e poitica. Rio de Janeiro: Liviaria AcadSmica. Couto, Hildo H. do 1983 Uma introdugäo d semiötica (Linguagem 22). Rio de Janeiro: Presen^a. D'Amaral, Marcio T. 1977 Filosofia da comunicagäo e da linguagem. Rio de Janeiro: Civilizafäo Brasileira. Da Matta, Roberto 1977 Carnavais, malandros e heröis: Para uma sociologia do dilema brasileiro. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar. Deely, John et al. (eds.) 1986 Frontiers in Semiotics (Advances in Semiotics). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Derrida, Jacques 1971 A escritura e a diferenga (Debates), trans, by M.B.M. Nizza da Silva. Säo Paulo: Perspective. 1973 Gramatologia (Estudos), trans, by Miriam Chnaiderman and R. Janine Ribeiro. Säö Paulo: Perspectiva. Duarte, Elizabeth B. 1989 Significagäo: Ο percurso das transposigöes no discurso legislativo. Unpublished dissertation, University of Säo Paulo. Dubois, J. et al. 1970 Rhetorique ginirale (Langue et Langage). Paris: Larousse. Eco, Umberto 1969 A obra aberta (Debates), trans, by G. Gdrson de Souza. Säo Paulo: Perspective. Epstein, Isaac 1973 Cibernetica e comunicagäo. Säo Paulo: Cultrix. 1985a Ο signo (Principios). Säo Paulo: Atica. 1985b Teoria da informagäo (Principios). Säo Paulo: Atica.

Semiotics in Brazil 169 Escobar, C. Henrique 1974 Semiologia e lingüistica. Rio de Janeiro: Eldorado. Ferrara, Lucrecia D. 1981 A estratigia dos signos (Estudos). Säo Paulo: Perspective Fiorin, J. Luis 1988a Ο regime de 1964. Discurso e ideologia (Lendo). Säo Paulo: Atual. 1988b Linguagem e ideologia (Princfpios). Säo Paulo: Atica. Genette, Gerard 1972 Figuras (Debates). Säo Paulo: Perspective Goldfarb, Ana M.A. 1987 Da alquimia ά quimica. Säo Paulo: Nova Stella. Greimas, A.J. 1966 Semantique structurale (Langue et Langage). Paris: Larousse. 1970 Du sens: Essais simiotiques. Paris: Seuil. Greimas, AJ.and Court6s, J. 1983 Diciondrio de semiötica, trans, by A. Dias Lima et al. Säo Paulo: Cultrix. Grellet, Vera 1990 Α contribuigäo da semiotica peirceana para a psicologia. Unpublished thesis, Säo Paulo Catholic University. Helbo, Andrd (ed.) 1980 Semiologia da representagao, trans, by D.L. Pessoa de Barros et al. Säo Paulo: Cultrix. Holquist, M. (ed.) 1981 The Dialogical Imagination by MM. Bakhtin (Slavic Series 1), trans, by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press. Ivan da Silva, Francisco 1988 Construgäo-desconstrugäo do ipico: Ulysses na travessia do grande sertäo. Unpublished dissertation, Säo Paulo Catholic University. Jakobson, Roman 1967 Fonema e fonologia, trans, by J. Mattoso Camara, Jr. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria Acadimica 1969 Lingüistica e comunicagäo, trans, by I. Bliksten and J. Paulo Paes. Säo Paulo: Cultrix. 1970 Lingüistica, poitica, cinema (Debates), trans, by F. Achcar et al.; H. de Campos and B. Schnaiderman (eds.). Säo Paulo: Perspective

170 Lucia Santaella Braga Krieger, Μ. da Gra^a 1990 Α retörica da transitividade. Unpublished dissertation, University of Säo Paulo. Kristeva, Julia 1974 Introdugäo ά semanälise (Debates), trans, by L. Helena F. Ferraz. Säo Paulo: Perspective. Kristeva, J., Rey-Debove, J., and Umiker, D.J. (eds.) 1979 Ensaios de semiologia, trans, by L. Costa Lima. Rio de Janeiro: Eldorado. Laurentiz, Paulo 1984 Ο cinema sem pianos. Unpublished thesis, Säo Paulo Catholic University. 1988 A holarquia do pensamento artistico. Unpublished dissertation, Säo Paulo Catholic University. L6vi-Strauss, Claude 1970 Antropologia estrutural (Biblioteca Tempo Universitär«) 7), trans, by C. Samuel Katz and E. Pires. Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro. Lima, Alceu Dias 1981 Ensaios de filologia e lingüistica. Säo Paulo: EDUSP. Lopes, Edward 1978 Discurso, texto, significagäo: Uma teoria do interpretante. Säo Paulo: Cultrix. 1988 Metäfora: Da retorica ά semiotica (Lendo). Säo Paulo: Atual. Machado, Arlindo 1985 Α ilusäo especular: Ensaio sobre a fotografia. Säo Paulo: Brasiliense. 1988 A arte do video. Säo Paulo: Brasiliense. Machado, I. Araujo 1989 Λ analogia do dissimilar: Bakhtin e ο Formalismo Russo (Debates). Säo Paulo: Perspectiva. Menezes, Philadelpho 1989 Α trajetöria da visualidade na poesia de vanguarda brasileira. Campinas: Ed. da UNICAMP. Miyasaki, Tieko J. 1988 Jose J. Veiga: De Platiplanto a Torvelinho (Lendo). Säo Paulo: Atual. Neiva Jr., Eduardo 1982 Tdticas do signo. Rio de Janeiro: Achiamd.

Semiotics in Brazil 171 Oliveira, Ana C. de 1987 Neolitico e arte moderna (Debates). Säo Paulo: Perspective 1989 Fala gestual. Unplublished dissertation, Säo Paulo Catholic University. Oliveira, Ana C. de and Santaella Braga, L. (eds.) 1987a Semiotica da literatura (Cadernos PUC 28). Säo Paulo: EDUC. 1987b Semiötica da cultura, da arte e arquitetura (Cadernos PUC 29). Säo Paulo: EDUC. 1987c Semiötica da comunicagäo e outras ciencias (Cadernos PUC 30). Säo Paulo: EDUC. Oliveira, Ubirajara de 1986 Ο que existe na verdade e a realidade? Unpublished thesis, Säo Paulo Catholic University. Pais, Cidmar T. 1977 Ensaios semiöticos e lingüisticos. Petröpolis: Vozes. Paschoale, Conrado 1988 Geologia como semiotica da natureza. Unpublished thesis, Säo Paulo Catholic University. 1990 A semiotica dos mapas geolögicos. Unpublished dissertation, Säo Paulo Catholic University. Peirce, Charles S. 1931-66 The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, C. Hartshorne, P. Weiss and A.W. Burks (eds.). Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1972 Semiotica e filosofia, trans, by O.S. da Mota and L. Hegenberg. Säo Paulo: Cultrix. 1975 Peirce e Frege (Os Pensadores 36), trans, by A. Mora DOliveira and S. Pomerangblum. Säo Paulo: Abril Cultural. 1977 Semiotica (Estudos), trans, by J. Teixeira Coelho. Säo Paulo: Perspective. Pefluela-Caflizal, E. 1977 Duos leituras semiöticas (Elos). Säo Paulo: Perspective. 1986 Surrealismo: Rupturas expressivas (Lendo). Säo Paulo: Atual. Perrone-Moisis, L. 1978 Texto, critica, escritura. Säo Paulo: Atica.

172 Lucia Santaella Braga Pessoa de Bairos, D i . 1988 Teoria do discurso: Fundamentos semiöticos (Lendo). Säo Paulo: Atual. Pignatari, Decio 1969 Informagäo, linguagem, comunicagäo (Debates). Säo Paulo: Perspectiva. 1974 Semiötica da literatura (Debates). Säo Paulo: Perspective. 1981 Semiötica da arte e da arquitetura. Säo Paulo: Cultrix. Pignatari, D. and Fenara, L. 1974 Etudes de s6miotique au Brisil. VS 8/9,21-31. Pinheiro, Amälio 1983 A textura obra-realidade. Säo Paulo: Cortez Editora. 1986 Cesar Vallejo: Ο abalo corpografico. Säo Paulo: Arte Pau Brasil. Pinto, Milton J. 1978 Anälise semäntica de linguas naturais. Rio de Janeiro: Forense Universitiria. Plaza, Julio 1969 Objetos. Rio de Janeiro: J. Barcellos. 1981 Reflections on and of theories of translation. Dispositio 6 (17/18) (Special issue edited by L. Santaella Braga), 4S-9S. 1986 Videografia em videotexto. Säo Paulo: Hucitec. 1987 TraduQäo intersemiotica (Estudos). Säo Paulo: Perspective Prado Coelho, E. (ed.) 1968 Estruturalismo (Problemas), trans, by M.E. Reis Colares et al. Portugal: Portugälia. Prieto, Luis J. 1973 Mensagens e sinais, trans, by Anne Arnichaud and Alvaro Lorencini. Säo Paulo: Cultrix. Rector, Monica 1978 Para ler Greimas. Rio de Janeiro: Francisco Alves. Rector, M. and Trinta, A. Ramos 1986 Comunicagäo näo-verbal: A gestualidade brasileira. Rio de Janeiro: Vozes. Rector, Monica (ed.) 1983 Anais do II Colöquio Brasileiro de Semiötica (Temas Universitirios 5). Rio de Janeiro: Loyola.

Semiotics in Brazil 173 1986

Anais do I Colöquio Luso-Brasileiro de Semiötica (mimeo edition). Niteröi: Universidade Federal Fluminense. Sä, Olga de 1979 A escritura de Clarice Lispector. Rio de Janeiro: Vozes. 1984 A travessia do oposto. Unpublished dissertation, Säo Paulo Catholic University. Santaella Braga, Lucia 1980 ProduQäo de linguagem e ideologia. Säo Paulo: Cortez Editora. 1982 Arte & cultura: Equivocos do elitismo. Säo Paulo: Cortez Editora. 1983 Ο que έ semiötica (Primeiros Passos 103). Säo Paulo: Brasiliense. 1986a As tres categories peirceanas e os tres registros lacanianos. Cruzeiro Semiötico 4, 25-30. 1986b Convergencias: Poesia concreto e tropicalismo. Säo Paulo: Nobel. 1988 For a classification of visual signs. Semiotica 70 (1/2), 59-78. 1989a Semiötica e psicanälise: Pontos de partida. Face 2 (2), in press. 1989b Ο inconsciente se reduz a uma questäo de linguagem? In 14 Conferencias sobre J. Lacan, Fanny Hisgail (ed.), 119-28. Säo Paulo: Escuta. Sapir, E. 1954 Linguagem, trans, by J. Mattoso Cämara, Jr. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Nacional do Livro. Saporiti, Elizabeth 1985 A mulher como signo em crise. Unpublished thesis, Säo Paulo Catholic University. 1988 Pressupostos para α interpretagäo analitica: C.S. Peirce e J. Lacan. Unpublished dissertation, Säo Paulo Catholic University. 1989 Nos impasses do gozo: Ο desejo e a 6tica do signo. Face 2 (2), in press. Saussure, Ferdinand de 1969 Curso de lingüistica geral, trans, by A. Chelini, J.P. Paes, and I. Blikstein. Säo Paulo: Cultrix. Schnaiderman, Boris 1971 A poetica de Maiakovski atraves de sua prosa (Debates). Säo Paulo: Perspectiva. 1979 Semiötica russa (Debates). Säo Paulo: Perspectiva. 1983 Turbilhäo e semente. Säo Paulo: Livraria Duas Cidades.

174 Lucia Santaella Braga Sebeok, Thomas A. 1985 Contributions to the Doctrine of Signs (Sources in Semiotics 4). Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Segolin, Fernando 1983 A heteronimia pessoana. Unpublished dissertation, Säo Paulo Catholic Unviersity. Sodrd, Muniz 1978 Teoria da literatura de massa. Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro. 1980 Α comunicagäo do grotesco. Petröpolis: Vozes. 1981 Ο monopölio da fala. Petröpolis: Vozes. 1983 A verdade seduzida. Rio de Janeiro: Codecri. 1984 Α mäquina de Narciso. Rio de Janeiro: Achiam6. 1985 Best-seller: A literatura de mercado. Säo Paulo: Atica. Solt, Mary Ellen (ed.) 1971 Concrete Poetry: A World View. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sogabe, Milton 1990 Imagem Y-material. Unpublished thesis, Säo Paulo Catholic University. Sousandrade 1888 Ο guesa. London: Cooke & Halsted, The Morfleld Press. Tatit, Luis 1986 Α canQäo: Eficäcia e encanto (Lendo). Säo Paulo: Atual. Tävola, Arthur da 1985 Comunicagäo a mito: Televisäo em leitura critica. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira. Teixeira Coelho, J. 1980 Semiotica, informagäo, comunicagäo (Debates). Säo Paulo: Perspective. Todorov, Tzvetan 1969 As estruturas narrativas (Debates). Säo Paulo: Perspectiva. Toledo, Dionisio (ed.) 1971 Teoria da literatura: Formalistas russos. Porto Alegre: Globo. 1978 Circulo Lingiiistico de Praga: Estruturalismo e semiologia. Porto Alegre: Globo.

Semiotics in Brazil 175 Trinta, Aluizio R. 1981 Le feuilleton tilevisi bresilien. Paris: Gallimard. Verön, Eliseo 1981 Α produQäo do sentido, trans, by D.L. Pessoa de Barros et al. Säo Paulo: Cultrix. Zillochi, Ana Maria 1987 A imagem da ηαηαςάο, descrigäo e dissertagäo. Unpublished thesis, Säo Paulo Catholic University.

Lucia Santaella Braga (b. 1944) is Professor of Theoretical Semiotics in the post-graduate studies program on Communication and Semiotics at Säo Paulo Catholic University, and President of Brazilian Semiotic Society. She is also a Vice President of the International Association for Semiotic Studies and a member of the International Semiotics Institute Collegium. She has previously published Produgäo de linguagem e ideologia (1980), Arte & cultura (1982), Ο que e semiotica (1983, 7th edition published in 1989), Edgar Allan Poe: Ο que em mim sonhou estd pensando (1985), and Convergencias: Poesia concreto e tropicalismo (1986). Forthcoming are Cultura da midia (1990) and Teoria geral dos signos (1990). She is presently working on Peirce's Theory of Evolution. Address: Rua Joäo Ramalho, 145, apto 141, CEP 05008 Perdizes, Säo Paulo, Brazil.

Semiotics in Colombia:

Within New Perspectives*

Armando Silva

Presentation In this paper I hope to present a general outline of the evolution of semiotics in Colombia. I will begin with a quick overview of those general tendencies in contemporary semiotics that may be considered the conceptual background for the development of semiotics within Colombian universities, as well as for private investigators. Then I will focus on the basic definitions that currently apply to semiotic theory in Colombia. As appendices, I will include information regarding post-graduate studies and specialized publications. On the Present Development of Semiotics From the point of view of the history of science, Kuhn (1971) speaks of a preparadigmatic period characterized precisely by struggles among diverse schools of thought, none of which predominates. In general terms, I believe this is the case with studies concerning language and the different modes of human communication. Undoubtedly, during these past years, new perspectives have appeared not only for language per se, but also for language in its social and cultural context, in relation to its use, to its possibilities for subjective analysis, and to its deep nexus with unconscious representations. On the other hand, it is evident today that the structuralist methodology used in linguistics and semiology is limited in dealing with nonverbal systems because the main structuralist concern has dealt with structures that produce meaning, but has ignored the problems of 'meaning as such'— its significance and communication process. Post-Structural Tendencies Within the context of scientific discourse, following Kuhn, a scientist who places himself outside the paradigm (which can be compared to an alchemist after the chemical revolution) excludes himself from the scientific community and from the

178 Armando Silva science which he practices; therefore, he would no longer be a scientist. Nevertheless, in pre-paradigmatic or 'crisis periods, it is acceptable to adhere to any of the theories in disagreement' (Lorenzano 1982: 51). Which are the viewpoints, theories, or objects of study that are in conflict today in semiotics? This may be explained—within a scope of maximum generalization, as is the object of this paper—from three different outlooks: Descriptive Semiotics (better understood as semiology) is concerned with the application of terms from a general metalanguage of the theory of signs to particular systems. This coincides with the first semiotic attempts at deciphering nonverbal objects of study with linguistic parameters. A new ground for these studies may be recognized in Benveniste (1966), which includes one of the most lucid contemporary linguistic lessons, and which opens the way for new theoretical and interpretive formulations proper to post-structuralism. Theoretical Semiotics deals with the elaboration of a metalanguage and with the definition of the terms in which to discuss the sign—as well as textual—situation of the meaningful and semiotic phenomena. Theoretical problems are fundamental in all the latest inquiries that proceed from the sign in search of broader and more productive criteria. This is most evident in Greimas, whose 'theory of modalities' for the analysis of narrative and discursive structures is characterized by its depth and theoretical construction; such is also the case with the narcological analysis of Genette or with the semanalysis as an interpretive perspective of Kristeva, or with a philosopher such as Garroni and his persistent questions regarding the limits of semiotics (1977). (See Silva 1982.) Interpretive Semiotics refers to the area of contact with epistemology, where the problems of knowledge and meaning comprehension are fundamental. This new semiotic perspective must describe not only the production, but also the interpretation of meaning. Within this generative outlook, the interpretive component aims at the different aspects of decoding or reading, as is radically indicated by the deconstructionism of Derrida (1967), or by the synthesis of postmodernism compiled in Lyotard's dense work (1984). Within this 'deep' tendency of semiotics, there has been a special emphasis on pragmatic studies in which the empirical 'addressee' (or 'narratant') becomes the fundamental aspect of semio-social or strictly discursive analysis. In another

Semiotics in Colombia 179 sense, the descriptive limitation of semiological linguistics is overcome: new questions arising from psychoanalysis have permitted the recognition of new 'spaces' where the 'subject' is a subject of borderline experiences, where the desiring body is adjacent to language, or where language—as a symptom—expresses more by what it hides than by what it manifests. Likewise, the encounter with psychoanalysis has enriched the study of imaginary processes, which had not been considered by semiotics. It is important to point out a new relationship between semiotics and hermeneutics, disciplines that have in common the search for a general theory of meaning. While semiotics pertains to the analysis of forms in which meaning is manifested, hermeneutics—as defined by Greimas and Courtis (1986)—'se place ä 1'intersection des domaines linguistiques et extra-linguistiques' (1986: 107), with the intervention of informal demands of 'reference', 'discursive subject', etc. It is important to distinguish between the philosophic project of hermeneutics (formulated by Dilthey and others) and the semiotic investigation of reception criteria concerning the meaning assigned to a given text (see Almeida 1986). Nevertheless, in the semio-cultural dimension, in which semiotics undertakes social practices as objects of study, it presents—as I perceive it—problems of interpretation not only linguistic but also extralinguistic; in this respect, in its cultural meaning, it is thus very similar to the hermeneutical perspective.

Hermeneutic Analysis: Discourses, Spaces and Figures, and Interactions A general outline of what I have called interpretive semiotics may be summarized in three basic trends, defined by their object of study and by the type of practice chosen. These three tendencies—discourses, spaces and figures, and interactions— may be briefly explained as follows. Discourses. Here I place those tendencies deriving from discourse analysis, its modalities (Greimas 1966; Greimas and Courtds 1986), its narrative structures (Genette 1972), or its enunciation conditions (Ducrot 1986). These thinkers are fundamental, but they are by no means the only ones. There is a very strong tendency toward this type of work in many countries. Specifically, in Colombia this is one of the more popular areas of interest for teachers and researchers from various universities. As may be supposed, this trend of discourse analysis has

180 Armando Silva especially stimulated linguists, many of whom have become specialists in what is now widely known as narrative semiotics. Spaces and Figures. In this trend, one can perceive a much broader spectrum of options and proposals related to proxemic and iconic analysis of film and mass media, of plastic arts, advertising, and city life; that is, of visual systems and their aesthetic manifestations. There are many scholars working in this area, but there are no dominant theories, as there are with 'discourses'. Nevertheless, it is important to underline the presence of such writers as Lacan (1966) and his effects on film analysis (Metz 1977); the influence of an anthropologist like L6vi-Strauss (1958, 1964) in mythology studies; and Panofsky's school of iconographies (1967). Gombrich's (1959) and Kandinsky's (1975) classic studies, which were written from a non-semiotic orientation, may be considered pioneers of these new trends because they integrate historic, psychological, and sociological criteria applied into the analysis of image and communication in art. New problems have arisen, different from those of the 'semiology' period—i.e., imaginary communication in art, the redefinition of the image, the relationship between myth and art, and the reception of communication processes. Interactions. Here I refer to semiotics as an object of mediation of social practices. This is one of the richest and most developed aspects of semiotics. Proposals such as Austin's (1982) and Searle's (1969), or the studies concerning 'text and context' of Van Dijk (1978), have made possible the development of forms of analysis in which the use of language is presupposed. For example: what is called 'illocutionary act' assumes an answer to a grammatical proposition which becomes social because its meaning is a result of the social context where it was uttered— that is, where the linguistic act took place. In this sense, I refer to the 'social trends of semiotics' as another area of present development. This semiotic orientation (concerning cultural interests), together with the pragmatic tendencies, have centered their attention on the presence and situation of destinataries within 'communicative agreements'. In this sense, cultural investigations—many of which use applied semiotics—make up one of the broadest and most promising areas of study in which anthropologists, communication experts, and sociologists participate. An interesting volume, recently published by Academic Press and edited by Elizabeth Mertz and Richard Parmentier, with the appealing title Semiotic Mediation, asserts, from a Peircean perspective, that 'the

Semiotics in Colombia 181 notion of mediation can be defined as any process in which two elements are brought into articulation by means of or through the intervention of some third element that serves as the vehicle or medium of communication' (Mertz and Parmentier [eds.] 1985: 25). This is a reformulation toward social action which other scholars had also described from the Peircean perspective of interaction: Eco (1976), Eliseo Verön (1977), Thomas Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok (eds.) (1979). This 'mediation' perspective can also be recognized in Hymes's sociolinguistics, in Labov, or Gumperz (1974); but it is perhaps more emphatically expressed in the semio-linguistic investigations of Charaudeau (1983), which emphasize the process of communication itself. These three basic trends of interpretive semiotics may be recognized as interwoven within contemporary perspectives. For example, the concept of 'enunciation' in linguistics is understood in its strict sense, rather than as the material phenomenon of speaking or hearing (a topic pertinent to psycholinguistics). It refers, then, to the 'elements which belong to the codes of language whose meaning vary from one enunciation to another, for example: You-I/herenow. Thus, what matters are the traces of the enunciation process in what is enunciated' (Ducrot and Todorov 1972). But the same concept of enunciation may be analyzed in effective cases where the actual speakers intervene, as is the case with sociolinguistic studies where the concepts of social and 'communication competence' are added to the 'linguistic competence' for speaking a language, correctly or not. Therefore, the 'enunciation' phenomenon, by including society and its practices, may be understood in a broader sense within anthropological linguistics. This encounter with cultural problems is a most significant process, one which summarizes the 'amalgamation area' where the present semiotic inquiry takes place. 'Amalgamation area' refers to a semiotic concept of culture understood in the sense in which Max Weber states that 'man is an animal suspended in the intricate web of meaning which he himself has woven'. Clifford Geertz conceives those 'intricate webs' as culture, and Yehuda Eldana specifies that 'the different dimensions of culture: religion, art, science, ideology, good sense and music, may be considered at the same level: they are all cultural systems' (Eldana 1983). Lotman is probably the first to open this new perspective of a semiotic structure of culture when he states that he studies

182 Armando Silva the mechanisms of unity and reciprocal functioning of diverse cultural systems...and thus culture as an intelligible mechanism: memory does not represent a rigid form of conservation, but an active and constant modelization mechanism although it refers to the past. (1977: 16) Investigations on cultural intermediation of discourses and on 'spaces and figures' may be considered as another example of this 'mixture of trends'. This is the case in analyses of such media as films, newspapers, or TV, or of cultural practices of Indian communities from which consequences of cultural behavior are obtained based on analysis of objects, discourses, or images. The very close nexus with anthropology is evident. Such is the case with the studies in 'symbolic semiotics' of Malinowsky, M. Eliade, or Ldvi-Strauss himself. A last example refers to the advances within the relationship between linguistics and psychoanalysis, initiated by Lacan in various of his writings. His followers have made the semiotic dimension more explicit. Such is the case with the relation of body to language or of the unconsciousness as knowledge: 'there is a knowledge that the mind can not know, it is unconscious knowledge, knowledge because it is written in letters, a knowledge which refuses meaning...a knowledge which is written in the memory and in the body, without the ego being aware of it' (Aleman and Sergio 1981: 40).

Perspectives of Semiotics in Colombia During these last years, there has been a renewed interest in semiotics in Colombia as well as in other Latin American countries. In a recent study I stated that a significant change in semiotic studies is easily recognized: from the seventies, a decade in which semiology was in vogue, when many amateurs loved it with the same incomprehension and furtive emotion with which they deny it today, we are now in another stage in which semiotics is studied within different disciplines and has become a real theoretic problem which needs true reflection and not just show-off. (Silva 1988)

Semiotics in Colombia 183 This new attitude has been greatly influenced by the development of semiotics as a science. Many of our social scientists interested in cultural problems have found semiotics to be a methodological and conceptual aid in their particular interests. Although there have not as yet been great theoretical advances in semiotic studies in Colombia, there are fresh ways of guiding its analysis, in a more careful and prudent manner with less astounding hopes of what could be expected. As a result of this mature tendency, the Colombian Society of Semiotics (SCS) was founded in 1987. It now has close to 120 members, and publishes an informative newsletter. The present development of semiotics in Colombia may be seen in the work carried out by the different universities where semiotics is taught. Diverse tendencies of thought can easily be recognized within the groups of study that have been formed at the universities. The stimulus of specific professors is clear in this type of work. Therefore, in order to present the general overview of semiotics in Colombia, I will make direct references to the activities carried out at the universities. These are organized according to the general classification of contemporary semiotics proposed above: discourses, space and figures, and interactions.

Discourses and Textual Analysis Narratological Studies. This field of study is probably one of the most appealing to Latin American researchers. It is worthwhile mentioning that in the 'Second Latin America Congress of Semiotics' (Rosario, Argentina, 1987), which I attended as a representative of Colombia, it was clear that this was the topic of preference, especially following the work of AJ. Greimas. Likewise, in Colombia, 'narratology' is an area pursued in many academic institutions. This is the case, for instance, at the Universidad del Valle (Cali), where a permanent seminar—under the direction of Eduardo Serrano of the Literature Department—has been dedicated to the analysis of A J . Greimas's and G. Genette's work in reference to literary discourse analysis. The Linguistics Department of the Universidad Nacional (Bogoti) has offered an alumni seminar on semiotics since 1986, conducted by Juan Gömez. As a result of this, a Group of Narratology Research has been created which edits the journal Narratologicas, each issue dedicated to a special theme, such as focalization or narration (see Appendix I for this and other periodicals on the topic).

184 Armando Silva A group of teachers interested in isotopic analysis of literature as well as in Greimas's actantial model has been consolidated at the Universidad Externado de Colombia (Bogoti), where a project for a master's program in semiotics is also being developed (see Appendix II for information on this and other post-graduate studies). Likewise, study groups in literary semiotics have been formed at the Universidad Pedagögica (Tunja) and the Universidad de Nariflo (Pasto). Their principal interest is in Latin American literature, and their conceptual problems deal with idealization, narrative processes, narrator-reader relationship, textual hermeneutics, and isotopic analysis. Dialectological Studies. In this field, I must make special mention of the outstanding studies of the Institute Caro y Cuervo (Bogotä), one of the best known classical philology centers of the Spanish language. Also deserving of mention is the extraordinary work of Luis Florez: the Linguistic and Ethnographic Atlas, published in various volumes by the Imprenta Patriötica of the same institute. This Atlas has been used as a model in other countries for the definition of maps concerning local uses of language and different regional practices. This Atlas compiles linguistic materials according to Colombian geographic regions, opening new spaces for future interpretations, as has been stated by the research group. Of course, as Ruten Arboleda (1987: 33) recalls, 'with the Atlas we have the possibility of dealing with subjects such as taboos and euphemisms, popular etymology, comparisons between the peasant urban and semiurban dialects and many others'. Textual Linguistics. This is precisely the title of an interesting anthology, published by Jaime Bemal (1986), which compiles essays by Colombian scholars as well as researchers from other countries, placing in evidence the theoretical context and the main trends of this tendency in Colombia. The Semiotics Seminar of the Instituto Caro y Cuervo is dedicated to the analysis of textual linguistics. Its coordinator, Alfonso Ramirez, together with the linguist Felipe Pardo, founded the Circulo Linguistico de Bogotä a few years ago. Sign Theory. This aspect which, more than any other, comes very close to philosophy is the area of interest of the Humanities Department of the Universidad Nacional (Medellin). One of the principal researchers has been Juan G. Moreno,

Semiotics in Colombia 185 who since 1988 has included semiotics as a field of study within the Master's Program in Colombian History. This has made possible the historical analysis of such new objects as fashion, photography, sexuality, advertising, and city life, among others. The University Javeriana (Bogotä) has shown some interest in philosophic and hermeneutical studies, and their interactions with semiotics. In 1985, teachers from the Schools of Philosophy and Social Communications established a permanent seminar dedicated to sign theory, focusing in particular cm the development of a general theory of 'message'. Special mention must be made of Jaime Rubio (1987), who has been working from the perspective of Paul Ricoeur, and of Mariluz Restrepo (1989), who completed her master's in philosophy with a thesis on Charles S. Peirce. Pragmatism and Enunciation Theories. Here I gather different proposals which emphasize the pragmatic aspect of communication. The interest in this type of work grows rapidly and is closely related to literary and theatrical texts. The postgraduate program in Linguistics at the Universidad del Valle (Cali), under the direction of Luis Baena, has been working within a pragmatic perspective. Other teachers from the same university are Carlos Väsquez, who is interested in literature and theater, and Carlos Restrepo, who coordinates the project for a master's program in Literature with emphasis on semiotics and has written various articles on the topic.

Analysis of Images, Space and Figures City and Urban Space. The Department of Architecture (part of the School of Art) of the Universidad Nacional (Bogoti) includes the subject of semiotics as part of its curriculum, and sponsors various publications which deal with the city, such as A/U (Urban Aspects), dedicated to urban analysis from a semiotic perspective. Within the same school, as part of the Department of Fine Arts, I established in 1978 the area of 'visual communications', with four different levels of study in semiotics applied to art and graphic design. Various publications of the same University have been dedicated to the iconography and 'popular' design of our cities (Silva 1986).

186 Armando Silva This topic also interests the School of Art of the Universidad Nacional in Medellin, where many related studies have also used photography and video productions. Perhaps the main contribution of the Medellin group has been to call attention to traditional 'popular' neighborhoods (for instance, Manrique) whose architecture and way of life have been seriously affected by the recent construction of the subway. Art Analysis. The need for new alternatives to replace traditional art criticism— generally journalistic rhetoric—has been evident. A master's program with a semiotic-aesthetic orientation is being planned at the Universidad Nacional (Medellin), directed by Juan Gonzalo Moreno and Jairo Montoya (1987). This will be the first post-graduate school to place special emphasis on approaching art from a theory of symbol, and will allow new professional perspectives toward art within the spectrum of language sciences in their connection to other social sciences. Film and Media Analysis. Film courses with a semiotic orientation are taught at the Universidad Javeriana (Bogotä). However, it has been the Department of Communication of the Universidad del Valle (Cali)—whose orientation has been influenced by Jesus Martin-Barbero—where media analysis has been developed more extensively (Martin-Barbero 1987). Media studies are also taken into consideration in two other Universities: Universidad Tecnolögica (Pereira) and Universidad Tecnologica (Armenia), where post-graduate studies in education emphasize aspects related to television and film.

Socio-Semiotic Analysis (Interactions) Sociolinguistic Studies. Within this topic, many studies and publications emphasize the speaker as the subject of communication, from whom different characteristics in the use of the language are derived. This is the prevailing tendency at the Universidad de Antioquia (Medellin), where Rito Llerena (1985) and Victor Villa have worked on popular music phenomena and uses of urban language. The sociosemiotic theory is also of interest; in this connection Rogelio Tobön's work on semiotics of silence must be mentioned (1989).

Semiotics in Colombia 187 Ethnology Studies. This refers to the analysis of the use of languages in different communities, especially within Indian groups. Although the semiotic perspective does not prevail in this type of work, the Schools of Anthropology of the Universidad Nacional (Bogotä) and the Universidad de los Andes (Bogotä) do take into consideration this semiotic perspective in their investigations. Semio-Linguistic Studies. The comprehension of discourse within social production processes is the principal area of interest in which the limits of the textual and extratextual are made evident. Thus, work in this area is based primarily on theoretical models of analysis or on design construction for 'field work'. Mention should be made here of the Circle of Discourse Analysis (CADIS), founded by Julio Escamilla (1987: 49-50) in Barranquilla and associated with the Universidad del Atläntico (Barranquilla), which pursues studies in philology and languages. This group has been working on the use of language in northern Colombia (Costefio) from a socio-semiotic perspective of discourse analysis. Social Communication Processes. This corresponds to a 'cultural' tendency of the Schools of Social Communication promoted by FELAFACS (Latin American Federation of Associations of Communication Schools), where the study of 'receptors' is being seriously considered from different points of view (Silva 1988). Semiotics has been discussed in relation to its contributions to communication studies. I consider this an interface between these two disciplines, which, by different ways, have arrived at similar questions and problems within a cultural perspective. The common interest in analyzing social actors has allowed a dialectic opposition between the production and interpretation processes in the strategies of the text itself (studies of 'narratants') as well as of social practices (studies on and from destinataries or receptors).

Appendix I:

Postgraduate Programs

The following is a list of the existing post-graduate programs for semiotics in Colombia: —Master's Program in Educational Communication, Universidad Tecnolögica (Pereira). The program was formed in 1988; semiotics is a fundamental subject within the methodological and conceptual areas.

188 Armando Silva —Master's Program in Linguistics, Universidad del Valle (Cali), under the direction of Luis Baena. —Master's Program in Linguistics, Institute Caro y Cuervo, under the Convenio Andr6s Bello with the other Andean Countries (Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia), coordinated by Jaime Bernal. These are some of the projects for post-graduate studies in Colombia which include semiotic studies: —Pregraduate Studies in Linguistics and Semiology, Universidad Extemado de Colombia (Bogota), in conjunction with the Instituto Caro y Cuervo. Project coordinated by Fabio Jurado and Fabio Gallego. The object is to integrate various theoretical options (Linguistics, Pragmatism, Ethnography, and Textual Linguistics) with semiotics. The principal areas will deal with discourses, images, media, and art. —Postgraduate Project, Universidad Industrial de Santander (Bucaramanga), in three areas (Linguistics, Aesthetics, and Theater); its emphasis will be on research. The project is coordinated by Alvaro Gongora. —Postgraduate Program in Semiotics, Humanities Department, Universidad Nacional (Medellin), coordinated by Juan Gonzalo Moreno. Preliminary conversations tended toward the analysis of symbolic theories as manifestations of human knowledge and its varied and complex relations in interaction and social semiosis. —Postgraduate program in Audiovisual Communication, Universidad Nacional (Bogotä), presented by Armando Silva. Students would be able to work with audiovisual media (film, video) based on a conceptual background of semiotic and anthropological theories. —Postgraduate Program in Literature, Universidad del Valle (Cali), coordinated by Carlos Restrepo. It includes semiotics as an important methodological aspect. —Master's Program in Communication, Universidad Javeriana (Bogotä), under the direction of Gabriel Jaime Pirez. Its emphasis is on cultural research, and semiotics is one of the areas of interest. This project has been approved and will begin in 1990. Appendix II:

Periodicals Relating to Semiotic Studies

A/U (Asuntos Urbanos). School of Art, Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Address: Universidad Nacional, Bogotä, Colombia.

Semiotics in Colombia 189 Ciencias Humanas. Journal of Universidad Nacional, Medellin. Address: Universidad Nacional de Medellin, Medellin, Colombia. Con-Textos. Journal of the School of Education, Universidad de Medellin. Address: Apartado Adreo 1983, Medellin, Colombia. Glotta. Journal for dissemination of linguistics, edited by the Mayer Institute. Address: Apartado Aireo 43.789, Bogotä, Colombia. Lenguaje en Acciön. Journal of the Circulo Lingüistico, Medellin. Address: Apartado A6reo 56.068, Medellin, Colombia. Lingüistica y Literatura. Journal of the Linguistics and Literature department of Universidad de Antioquia. Address: Apartado A6reo 1226, Medellin, Colombia. Narratologicas. Journal of the Group in Narratology Research of the Semiotics Seminar, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogotä. Address: Apartado A6reo 41.804, Bogotä, Colombia. Otras Quijotadas. Journal of a study group in Medellin. Address: Apartado A6reo 050758, Medellin, Colombia. Revista Universidad del Valle. Address: Universidad del Valle, Cali, Colombia. Signo y Pensamiento. Journal of the School of Social Communication, Universidad Javeriana. Address: Carrera 7 No. 43-82, Bogotä, Colombia. Sobre Semiotica. Informative Bulletin of the Sociedad Colombians de Semiotica, Bogotä. Address: Apartado Aereo 50.231, Bogotä 2, Colombia. Texto y Contexto. Journal of the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotä. Address: Carrera 1 Este No. 18a-10, Bogotä, Colombia. Thesaurus. Specialized journal in philology and language of the Instituto Caro y Cuervo de Bogotä. Address: Apartado A6reo 51.502, Bogotä, Colombia.

Note *

Translated into English by Mariluz Restrepo.

References Aleman, Jorge and Larriera, Sergio 1981 Unaridad del significante. Madrid: Ediciones CTP.

190 Armando Silva Almeida, Ivän 1986 Semiotique et interpretation (Prepublications 153-54). Urbino: Centre» Internazionale di Semiotica e di Linguistica. Arboleda, Ruten 1987 El ALEC y algunas obras conexas. Glotta 2 (3), 32-41. Austin, J.L. 1982 C6mo hacer cosas con palabras, trans, by Genaro Carriö and Eduardo Rabossi. Barcelona: Paidös. Benveniste, Emile 1966 Problemas de lingüistica general, trans by Juän Almela. Μέχίοο, D.F.: Siglo XXI. Bemal, Jaime 1986 Antologia de lingüistica textual. Bogotä: Institute Caro y Cuervo. Charaudeau, Patrick 1983 Langage et discours: Elements de semiolinguistique. Paris: Hachette Universiti. Derrida, Jacques 1967 De la gramatologia, trans, by Oscar del Barco. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Ducrot, Oswald 1986 Le dire et le dit. Paris: Minuit. Ducrot, O. and Todorov, T. 1972 Diccionario enciclopedico de las ciencias del lenguaje, trans, by Enrique Pezzoni. M6xico, D.F.: Siglo XXI. Eco, Umberto 1976 Tratado de semiotica general, trans, by Carlos Manzano. Barcelona: Lumen. Eldana, Yehuna 1977 La cultura cientifica en el mundo contempordneo, trans, by Jose Granes. Bogotä: Sociedad Colombiana de Epistemologia. Escamilla, Julio 1987 El ctrculo de anälisis del discurso. Glotta 2 (3), 49-51. Garroni, Emilio 1977 Ricognizione de la semiotica. Rome: Officina Edizioni. Genette, Gerard 1972 Figures III. Paris: Seuil.

Semiotics in Colombia 191 Gombrich, Ernst 1959 Art and Illusion. London: Phaidon Press. Greimas, A.J. 1966 Elements pour une thiorie de 1'interpretation du ricit mythique. Paris: Points. Greimas, A.J. and Courtis, J. 1986 Semiotique, dictionnaire raisonne de la thiorie de langage, vol. 2. Paris: Hachette Universit6. Gumperz, John 1974 The Sociolinguistics of Interpersonal Communication (Pre-publications 33). Urbino: Centra Internazionale de Linguistica e Semiotica. Kandinsky, W. 1975 Programme de course pour Le Bahaus (1929). Paris: Denoel-Gonthier. Kristeva, Julia 1972 Semiotica, trans, by Jos6 Martin Arancibia. Madrid: Fundamentos. Kuhn, Thomas 1971 La estructura de las revoluciones cientificas. Mixico, D.F.: F.C.E. Lacan, Jacques 1966 Escritos, trans, by Tomäs Segovia. M6xico, D.F.: Siglo XXI. L6vi-Strauss, Claude 1958 Antropologia estructural, trans, by Eliseo Verön. Buenos Aires: Eudeba. 1964 Lo crudo y lo cocido. Buenos Aires: Eudeba. Llerena, Rito 1985 Memoria cultural en el Vallenato. Medellin: Centra de Investigaciones, Universidad de Antioquia. Lorenzano, C6sar 1982 La estructura psicosocial del arte. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI. Lotman, Juri 1977 La cultura come mente colletiva e i problemi del la inteligenza artificiale (Pre-publication 66). Urbino: Centra Internazionale di Semiotica e di Linguistica. Lyotard, J.F. 1984 La condicion posmoderna, trans, by Mariano Antolin. Madrid: Cätedra. Martin-Barbero, Jesus 1987 De los medios α las mediaciones. M6xico, D.F.: Gustavo Gili.

192 Armando Silva Mertz, Elizabeth and Parmentier, Richard (eds.) 1985 Semiotic Mediation: Sociocultural and Psychological Perspectives. Orlando, FL: Academic Press. Metz, Christian 1977 El significante imaginario, trans, by Josep Elias. Barcelona: Gustavo Gili. Montoya, Jairo (ed.) 1987 Teoria del arte (Revista de Ciencias Humanas 10). Medellin: Universidad Nacional. Panofsky, Erwin 1967 Essais d'iconologie. Paris: Gallimard. Restrepo, Mariluz 1988 El mensaje: Categoria de comunicaciön. Signo y Pensamiento 7 (12), 5-10. 1989 Ontologia de la accion: Hacia una aproximaciön hermeniutica de la cultura. Paper presented at the Charles S. Peirce Sesquicentennial Congress, Harvard University, Cambridge. Rubio, Jaime 1987 Explicar y comprender: Hermeniutica y ciencias sociales—problemas metodolögicos (mimeo). Bogotä: Universidad Javeriana. 1988 El mensaje: De la semiötica a las präcticas de la cultura. Signo y Pensamiento 7(12), 11-26. Searle, John 1969 Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sebeok, Thomas A. and Umiker-Sebeok, Jean 1979 Sherlock Holmes and Charles S. Peirce: El metodo de la investigaciön, trans, by Lourdes Giiell. Barcelona: Paidos. Silva, Armando 1982 Arte y semiötica. Bogotä: Universidad Pedagögica. 1986 Graffiti: Una ciudad imaginada. Bogotä: Universidad Nacional. 1988 La semiötica y la comunicaciön social en Colombia. Revista Didlogos (FELAFACS) 22, 28-37. Tobön, Rogelio 1989 Semiötica del silencio. Revista Coloquios Lingüisticos 2 (1), 20-31.

Semiotics in Colombia 193 Van Dijk, T. 1978 La ciencia del texto. Buenos Aires: Paidos. Verön, Eliseo 1977 La semiosis social (Pre-publications 64). Urbino: Centra Intemazionale di Semiotica e di Linguistica.

Armando Silva (b. 1948) is an Associate Professor at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, in Bogotä; he teaches Esthetics and Semiotics in the School of Arts and a Seminar on Psychoanalysis and Semiotics in the Department of Anthropology. He specialized in Linguistics and Literature in the Universidad Complutense and the Instituto de Cultura Hispänica in Madrid, Spain, earned his Master's degree in Philosophy with special emphasis on Esthetics from La Facoltä di Lettere e Filosofia de la Universiti di Roma, and has completed doctoral studies in Language Sciences at L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris. Professor Silva has written various books and articles on art, language, city life, and mass media, which are his principle themes of interest. He is the founder and president of the Sociedad Colombiana de Semiötica, and is a member of various scientific societies concerned with social sciences and languages. Address: Apartado Adreo 50.204, Bogotä 2, Colombia.

Semiotics in Peru 1980-1988* Enrique Ballön

The previous reports on the situation of semiotics in Peru (Ballön 1986a) described semiotic activities up to 1980. Since then study and research in this area of knowledge have grown in depth and diversity. The present essay attempts to give a brief account of a new stage, using the same format as in the first report.

Evolution of Peruvian Semiotics Between 1980 and 1988 The first characteristic of semiotics in Peru during the last eight years is its exercise as an independent branch of 'knowledge' which interacts with other social sciences. While Peruvian semiotics had to create and establish its field of intellectual endeavor during the 1970s, in the 1980s semiotic research has expanded its scope and has established several interdisciplinary links with related studies. In this way, not only have new objects of knowledge been inaugurated (i.e., the semiotics of translation and the analysis of referred, historical-literary, chronicle, or mass-media discourses); innovative research avenues have also been opened: literary and linguistic (especially on the diglossic Peruvian situation), anthropological (comparative studies of mythic motifs), historical (establishing an organized distribution of national historical discourses), and psychoanalytical (examination of psychocriticism in light of the contributions made by the semiotic description of texts), among others. The results of many of these investigations have been disseminated outside Peru, thereby expanding the range of their influence. In recent years, Peruvian semioticians have reported the progress made in their research by means of courses, seminars, conferences, lectures, and other academic activities—mainly in Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Universidad Autönoma de Puebla), Venezuela (Universidad Central de Caracas, Instituto Römulo Gallegos, Universidad de los Andes, Consejo Nacional de Culture), Argentina (Universidad Nacional de Rosario), Ecuador (CIESPAL), the United States (Dartmouth College), Spain (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas), France (Ecole des Hautes Etudes

196 Enrique Ballön en Sciences Sociales de Paris, Universiti de Toulouse), the People's Republic of China (University of Beijing, University of Nanjing), and Canada (Universit6 du Qu6bec ä Montröal). This exchange of knowledge, as well as visits to Peru by foreign experts such as Eric Landowski, Herman Parret, and Bernard Andres, among others, has contributed greatly to the development and revitalization of Peruvian semiotics. Not only have the previous accomplishments been preserved, but the work continues to develop along the lines envisioned as well. In what follows I will highlight the most important advances of the last eight years.

General Semiotic Theory and Methodology Following the path established during the preceding decade, several Peruvian investigators have deepened their reflection on semiotics—theoretically as well as methodologically—particularly in the areas of literature, poetics, and ethnoliterature. Susana Reisz-Rivarola (1986) published her Teoria literaria—Una propuesta. Although applying a general epistemological perspective of a philological and aesthetic nature (dependent on a vision which encompasses the theory of reception, of genres, and of discursivity), her literary theory touches upon various problems pertaining to semiotics—for example, the problematic of modalities, the typology of discourses, and enunciation. This work is intended to be a pedagogic and above all a descriptive instrument—heuristic as much as hermeneutic—of the highest precision and univocality, solidly founded on the theoretical tradition of literature and on topics treated to a great extent by contemporary semiotics. However, its explicit interest lies in its elaboration of a 'general' theory of the literary phenomenon (academic literature, sub-literature, etc.), where the semiotic topics included are subordinate to that purpose. For this reason we find here not a unified perspective, but a fragmented one, reflected mainly in the diversity of the paradigms concurrently employed (Genette, van Dijk, Jakobson, Lotman, Stierle, etc.). Yet, in an extensive essay written by J.L. Rivarola and S. Reisz-Rivarola (1984), we find a unified reflection on the two motivations, epistemological and semiotic, proposed by M. Ron to elucidate certain problems of communication and of discursive production. Here the two authors proceed to refine the notions mentioned, applying them to the process they call 'discursive conjunctions'—that

Semiotics in Peru 197 is to say, to the 'simultaneous presence of the two acts of enunciation' found in literary discourses. In light of these motivations, they proceed to examine the concepts of direct, indirect, and free indirect discourse, with abundant examples taken from Latin American literature. Other more specific criteria elaborated in contemporary poetics and textology are also incorporated: for instance, the 'indirect discourse, mimetic to some degree' of McHale, and the pseudo-indirect discourses defined as 'those cases in which a given discourse refers indirectly to everything pertaining to deictic transposition but not to syntactic construction typical of indirect discourse (verbum dicendi and conjunctional subordinated) or of free indirect discourse (absence of verbum dicendi and of subordinant conjunction).' The matter outlined above touches upon such major functions as literality, verisimilitude, and fictionality, and on two particularly difficult obstacles of literary semiotics: referred discourse and the phenomenon (not yet well described) of socialization in free indirect discourse. Similarly, various essays by R. Bueno (1985a, 1988a) touch upon problems of academic literary semiotics. In them we find several contributions to the analysis of narrative components, through formalizations binding three important factors of the ricit into one single theoretical object: implicit author (basic speaker), voice (narrator), and time of the narrated. These essays evaluate the relationship between Latin American theory and literary criticism, both founded on certain sociosemiotic postulates. From a broader perspective than the one required by literary semiotics, the approach of D. Blanco (1985a) is a conscientious effort to propose some hypotheses which permit us to understand and to describe the possibilities and limits of general semiotics. Regrettably, this orientation has not been continued in Blanco's subsequent work. Another field of theoretical and practical investigation expanded in recent years is the multilinguistic and pluricultural situation of Peruvian society. To the notion of a linguistic and literary diglossia, the concepts of linguistic and literary heteroglossia (initially 'multiglossia') have been added to describe and to analyze the unique phenomenon of the contact among Peruvian languages, their interferences and conflicts. In this regard, and expanding upon the propositions of Catalonian sociolinguistics, the semantic and ideological values produced in discourses characteristic of that particular sociosemiotic situation have been examined in connection with the legislation of Peruvian languages, the educational policies of the state, and the mass media (Ballön 1983a, 1986b, 1987a). Particular

198 Enrique Ballön attention has been paid to the general diagram of the Peruvian linguo-cultural and literary situation (Ballön 1985a, 1986c, d, e, f, and g), as well as to the theoretical and methodological postulates, in order to approach a lexicography receptive to the lexicon of the dominated ancestral languages and to the Castilian language now dominant in Peru (Ballön 1985b). Anthropological semiotic theory has paid special attention to the 'ritual table'. Two studies—one on Andean ritual (Martinez 1987) and another on coastal ritual (Campodönico 1985)—give account of these manifestations of Latin American traditional culture. Martinez studies the 'ritual table* on the expression and content planes, and on the three stages of the narrative plane: construction, burning, and reception of the 'table*. While explaining the semiotic nature of the ritual, Martinez produces an outline of its basic structure and of the so-called veridictorian modalization. Campodönico expands and sharpens her previous investigations of the ethnotaxonomies 'referring to the semantic pregnancy linked to the categorization (lexical and semantic) of the world*, and adds positional and junctional values to the description of the 'rigorous topology of the sorcerer's "table"'. From a strict theoretical perspective, Campodönico proposes 'to reify the paradigmatics implicit in descriptive and definitional peasant discourse' and to build a syncretic semiotics to unite natural semiotics and anthropo- (or ethno-) sociosemiotics. The two studies are complementary in that they employ the same methodology (semiotics of the Paris School) and, pursuing similar goals, establish this new area of knowledge ascribed to popular culture. It is appropriate here to point out specific themes pertaining to semiotic theory—for instance, the constitution of the corpus to which analysis is to be applied. In a relatively extensive essay devoted to philological, linguistic, and semiotic confluences, Ballön (1987d) considers a 'level of cognitive apprehension' in the constitution of the corpus, capable of guaranteeing the 'obtained results' in ethnosemiotic analysis, 'thus allowing the formulation of new investigative hypotheses'. The steps required to obtain an adequate corpus are determined by several cognitive registers: (a) procedure, description, and construction; (b) model, generation, and textualization; and (c) homogeneity, representativity, and exhaustivity. The parameters which were found tend to ensure the scientific validity of the corpus—and in this way facilitate a more rigorous analytic coherence. In another direction, a special type of discursive modality—substantive modality as a special class of the halotactic and translative modalities (Ballön 1983b, 1985c, 1986h)—is treated 'starting with the projection of the category of substantivaüon into the semiotic framework'. By placing this category 'in opposing relation, the

Semiotics in Peru 199 schemes of semiotic existence (estar/no-estar) and of essence in the semiotic sense (ser/no ser)', it is possible to unfold the 'essential* and 'existential' properties of the verbs whose manifestation is usually expressed by only one lexeme (French etre, English to be, Quechua kay, etc.) or occasionally two lexemes (Spanish serfestar, Italian, Portuguese, Catalonian, etc.)· Thus, using the discriminatory character of these doubly manifested verbal categories, Ballön specifies accurately the independent characteristics, until now undifferentiated, of both semantic properties.

Semiotic

Analysis

Culture Unlike the 1970s, recent years have not produced a single study devoted exclusively to the semiotics of culture. In spite of this fact, we note a persistent preoccupation with the signification of the defining features of institutional objects of Peruvian official culture (sociolinguistic studies) and their opposites, objects typified as products of our natural infraculture (ethnosemiotic studies). The first problem investigated in this area is the categorization of Peruvian languages ordered by the National Constitution of 1979. Ballön (1983a, 1986b, 1987a) discusses the resultant hierarchical classification of Peruvian languages on three levels—the official Castilian language, languages of 'official usage', and 'national' languages—showing both the ethnocentric and the glottophagic criteria behind the linguistic policies produced by the Peruvian state. His studies point out the negative effects of cultural discrimination on the survival of values passed down by Peruvian ancestral languages, and especially the legal impositions of a government incapable of proposing a non-alienated linguistic and cultural policy. This last point can be demonstrated by examining the official regulations concerning Peruvian languages in connection with the prevailing educational system. Furthermore, the study makes specific reference to other means of cultural socialization by language (for instance, lexicon and literature), and proposes an examination of desemantization and resemantization processes characteristic of this phenomenon. Recently, Peruvian semioticians have increasingly been inclined to investigate products of so-called 'popular culture', either in its ancestral aspects (for instance,

200 Enrique Ballön studies devoted to Peruvian chronicles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries), its traditional aspects (analysis of today's Peruvian ethnoliterature and of certain customary rituals), or its contemporary aspects (studies on mass media, which are now of great interest in our academic communities). Their inclination to describe the contents of marginalized cultural values can be explained as a result of the unique character of Peruvian semiotic motivations—especially the domination which official academic sectors have imposed upon the values that make up our national identity. This situation leaves an open field which semiotic activity undertakes as an exercise of denunciation and revindication. In fact, in this area there is no other kind of discipline that can assume this task in a consistent fashion.

Film and Photography Two texts by Blanco on film (1987, forthcoming) reveal an increasing interest in Peruvian cinematographic criticism. In one of them a speculative component of a semiotic nature is included. I am referring to an anthology of commentaries on a vast selection of movies, published between 1965 and 1977 in various specialized and nonspecialized Peruvian journals. Of particular interest in this case are the articles which appeared between 1972 and 1977 (1987: 199-346) and which were reprinted in two chapters entitled 'Structure of film' and 'Cinematographic ideology'. In spite of the journalistic nature of these chronicles, they refer to topics of general semiotics woven into the essay's discourse along with other orders of knowledge. The author maintains that 'meaning is the result of construction', and that criticism 'explores the elements of film structure and clarifies the relationship established between these elements', arriving at the critical epiphany through a chain of influences such as this: 'The operations of production of meaning are determined by material conditions of discursive production. It is the relationship between the former operations and the latter conditions which produces the ideology of cinematographic discourse. Ideology is understood here as a grammar of production, as a set of rules to construct a discourse and the meaning effects promoted by it.' Recently Blanco has changed his perspective, declaring that his criticism 'will be interested in discovering the mechanisms by which discourse speaks the way it speaks and in the ideological dimension that is produced in each discourse,

Semiotics in Peru 201 demythologizing the transparency of the image, and surpassing the simple description of structures of meaning.' We do not find, however, in the texts of this anthology, a single 'description of structures of meaning', either simple or complex, to 'surpass'. The presentation of three photographic expositions1 motivated Ball0n to give a lecture on each, having to do with the semiotics of photographic iconization. In these he discussed the process of desemantization revealed by each of the photographic techniques used in the corpus described. The figurative formants of planar representation were organized, starting with two types of categories—topological (rectilinear and curvilinear) and plastic (eidetic and chromatic)—and the signifying text was organized following the basic opposition continuous/discontinuous. Plastic contrasts and anaphors guided the semantic information of these semisymbolic codes. Thus a particular phenomenon, the property which certain signif i e s have of containing in themselves contradictory signifieds, was described through information offered by cultural values discovered in two ways: identification and interpretation of the photographic icon. This model, briefly described, allows verification of its interpretive and explanatory virtues when it is applied to the three photographic samples—and not merely, as is customary, to independent photographs treated as autarchic icons.

Plastic Arts I must begin this section with a hard fact, put straightforwardly: semiotic studies on plastic arts in Peru are meager. Only in recent years have the first analyses of certain plastic works—like the 'banners' of P. Zignago (Ball..•ξ ? .5 a bp«

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716 Colwyn Trevarthen infants sometimes make in play with their mothers (Plate 3—Ο, P; Plate 4—Η, I; Plate 5—D; Plate 6—B, D, F). Attention to the mirror is evidently a side effect of self-consciousness in response to the attention of others (i.e., part of a self-other consciousness), because at the same time he or she discovers the fun of watching the mirror self, the baby is becoming more expert at sharing jokes and showing o f f , with precisely and appropriately regulated eye contact, with the familiar and appreciative partner. The infant behaves in a calculating way to gain attention or tease. Reddy (1989) has recently examined this 'mucking about' behavior, or play with the intentions of others, revealing its significance for interpretations of mental development. We should note that a baby can show clear evidence of a sense of humor as early as three months, by responding with hearty laughter to the mother's playful teasing (Plate 1—M). Play between mothers and six-month-olds is full of such meta-communications, ways of communicating about potentially communicative behaviors (Bateson 1955). They set up complex chasing or 'fighting' with each other's expressions, the mother often teasing the baby to get laughter (Figure 3). They may exchange habitual grimaces or gestures, making them into 'jokes' that are quickly recognized. The infant imitates more deliberately and with more discrimination, and uses the imitated acts as signs which can be offered or withheld to control the partner (Uzgiris 1984). Mothers successfully teach 'tricks' and 'performances', like hand-clapping or exaggerated postures or strange grimaces, often in the context of a ritual nursery song, chant, or action game (Plate 3—Β, E; Plate 4—B, C, J, K; Plate 6—J).

'Protosigns' Performing Imitated Actions with Awareness of their Expressive Value In displays of imitated tricks, 'funny' faces and performances of game routines, six- to twelve-month-old infants show increasing awareness of their capacity to link and reciprocate feelings and actions with a partner. They orient and time their behaviors with respect to the orientation, interest, and emotional expression of the other person. Since three months of age they have shown pleasure, by laughing, in the games and teasing of their mothers—games that are are structured, intu-

Signs before speech 717 itively and by tradition, to facilitate synchronization of actions, experiences, and expressions of feeling. We have seen that infants only five months of age quickly learn to take a part in the developing pattern of a nursery song. They can anticipate games of suspense such as 'pop-goes-the-weasel' and 'peekaboo' (Bruner and Sherwood 197S; Trevarthen 1986a). After six months the infant increasingly takes the initiative, recreating a form of action or an expression while striving to elicit play or laughter from a partner (Plates 4 and 5). Parents notice babies of more than six months not only reacting with learned behavior to certain stimuli (Plate 4—B, D), but also deliberately recreating 'jokes' or 'tricks' for display, sometimes without any cue, 'out of the blue'. At this stage infants are experimenting with vocalizations. They can begin to sing and can learn little vocal performances to amuse other people and themselves (Papousek and Papousek 1981).

Offering Signs when Contact is Broken Remarkable evidence for self-consciousness comes from the reactions of infants to a brief interruption of contact with the trusted other. If the mother, who has been behaving as the familiar loved playmate, is asked to keep still, compose an inexpressive face, and cease to engage in response to the baby, an infant six months old or older will often put on a 'performance', repeating a learned trick or a funny expression with insistence and looking hard at the mother to excite some response, thereby making it very difficult for the mother to keep sober and unresponsive. She averts her gaze and struggles not to laugh (Plate 3—Ο, P; Plate 4—H, J, K; Plate 5—D, H; Plate 6—B, F). Similar challenging performances also appear, in a more impulsive, fragmentary way, when the baby is with a stranger, the 'showing o f f being made as a brief impulsive emission of friendliness in the course of an awkward, embarrassed, or fearful contact with the stranger, who is normally puzzled and uncomfortable (Plate 2—F, K; Plate 4—G). Almost always, the infant's brave challenges or 'jokes' receive a mixed, amused, or sarcastic response that tends to decrease rather than increase their mutual confidence and pleasure. The two situations in which we have recorded examples of these displays are such that the partner is giving no lead or encouragement. In one case the mother is attempting to withhold all kinds of response, presenting a stationary, inexpressive face to the child, who is apparently working to break her resistance. In the

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720 Colwyn Trevarthen other case, the baby is confronted by a stranger who is trying to communicate, but who is rather at a loss as to how to get the baby to be friendly and to play. While expressing clear suspicion and withdrawal, the baby makes brief displays of learned tricks which, being unexpected, unfamiliar, and 'out of context', are usually not understood by the stranger. These 'offerings' of learned fragments of behavior are, I believe, correctly described as protosigns (Trevarthen 1986b). They are conventional in the minisociety of the family, where they are used to convey a kind of solidarity of understanding. Their use with strangers, while inappropriate, is particularly interesting because it demonstrates that these acts are, for the baby, something to be exchanged socially. The presentation of these discrete, learned, and artificial forms of expressive movement as 'messages' or 'offerings' in a difficult social encounter with an unfamiliar person, or as jokes to tempt an unresponsive mother, gives them a special psychological character. They are oriented toward the partner, and they capture the partner's interest and feelings. A protosign may cause surprise and laughter, but it will also cause admiration for its 'clevemess', because the behavior seems appropriate as the message of a self-assured signer. Unlike a sign stimulus in animal communication, it does not stimulate any particular innate pattern of response; it has an inherent arbitrariness of form or application carried in phatic communication. Protosigns start as metacommunication in play, and then become separate learned elements. The motivation that turns them into displays will develop into protolanguage and the 'deferred imitations' of fantasy play.

The Debut of the Social 'Me' and Social Trust This kind of pretentious communication, in which signs are emphasized, displayed, and repeated insistently so that they will claim the interest and admiration of another, seems to be linked in development with a suspicious fear of an unfamiliar and potentially unsympathetic or uncomprehending stranger. The baby, while capable of infectious joy in play with a trusted partner, may show extreme mistrust leading to expressions of fear and crying with an unfamiliar person who approaches and invites communication (Plate 2—G, L; Plate 4—E, F, L; Plate 5—Ε, Μ, T; Plate 6—G, Η, I). The fear is enhanced if this person expresses a harsh and slightly aggressive amusement at the baby's confusion. Thus the developing self-consciousness of a seven- to eight-month-old is manifested simulta-

Signs before speech 721 neously in pretending or joking with 'friends' and in sensitivity to incomprehension or ridicule by a stranger.

Dual Orientation within a Shared Pragmatic Context Person-Person-Object (PPO) Games: From three to six months, infants, in addition to being intensely interested in looking at objects and trying to grasp them, are also increasingly sensitive to the 'presentation* of objects by others (Trevarthen and Hubley 1978). They watch the mother's hands to see their actions, and they listen to the vocal 'gloss' that she is likely to give her movements when she is holding out and moving a toy (Stern et al. 1985) (Plate 2—A, B; Plate 3—H). That infants have perception of these socio-dramatic communications is proved by imitation tests, which show that the baby can reproduce similar vocal contours and hand movements, a kind of imitation that is more common between three and five months (Kugiumutzakis 1985; Kuhl and Meltzoff 1982; Maratos 1982; Trevarthen 1986a). A three-month-old may show great absorption in a mother's handling of a toy while still too young to control his or her reaching to grasp the object of interest. Although the baby usually does not yet seek eye contact with the mother to confirm or elaborate communication around the object, 'moods' of interest in the play are signaled to her by squeals, growls, yells, raspberries, intake and expulsion of breath, laughter, or various sounds of impatience or annoyance. Objects the infant successfully gets hold of, in spite of the still inadequate control of reaching and grasping, are explored by fingering, pushing, banging, and taking to the mouth. The manipulative play has, however, a preoccupied, selfabsorbed quality, and any communications seem indirect, almost incidental. At this age the baby appears to have two mutually exclusive states of general motivation: one exploratory and manipulative, the other seeking engagement with the feelings and actions of another person (Trevarthen 1982). Objects are gradually incorporated into person-person games (Plate 3—H; Figure 3), and the baby begins to refer to the partner's emotions to gain feelings for agreed upon qualities of things. However, the baby tends to push aside the mother's play when absorbed in the 'secondary circular reactions' involved in handling objects (Trevarthen and Hubley 1978).

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724 Colwyn Trevarthen Expressive Signs for Objects—Reciprocal Imitation of Signs and Object Use— Emotional Referencing In the second six months, infants coordinate their self-centered orientation to events with a partner's other-centered orientation. To do this they must adjust the body-referred space of their action to those actions of the other that are related to that other person's body, and they must coordinate moves of attending, manipulating, and communicating with the timing of the other person's moves. For example, to follow a mother's pointing toward an object in a shared space/time frame, the baby must conceive the mother's line of attention and orientation and find a place and thing to which it leads from the mother's body (Scaife and Bruner 1975; Murphy 1978). To share the climax of a nursery song, with precise anticipation of the beat, rhythm, and melodic development, as a five-month-old can do, requires a coordination in timing of action and experience. Imitation experiments give complementary evidence that babies of this age can choose to match their expressions, postures, or actions on objects to those of another person (Lewis and Brooks-Gunn 1979; Uzgiris 1984). The interest they show in reflections of themselves in a mirror (especially clear when recorded by a camera behind the mirror) prove that the baby can play with this kind of interpersonal equivalence. Thus, when a baby looks at his or her mirror reflection and opens the mouth, moves the tongue, touches it and laughs after seeing the mother poke her tongue out, or if the baby watches in the mirror with a smile to observe him- or herself perform a trick like hand-clapping, or observes self-clowning in reaction to the mother keeping her face still, all these behaviors demonstrate interest in the relationship between what someone else does or does not do and the 'significance' of acting oneself (Plates 3,4, and 5). 'Checking' behavior, by which the baby directs attention to the eyes, face, voice, or hands of the partner (or to various combinations of these) shows how the infants' growing awareness of how to coordinate with the other person's mind is coupled to a need for specific information on expressed details of their feelings, interests, and intentions (Plate 5—F, P, Q). Infants regulate such direct interpersonal contacts from early months, and the way they check back undergoes marked development between three months and one year. After six months they are increasingly aware of the possibility that what they are about to do can be qualified by how their mothers will feel about it, and they systematically start to orient to

Signs before speech 725 gain emotional referencing from their mothers' faces and voices (Bretherton et al. 1981; Klinnert et al. 1983). All these interactions of subjectivities (intersubjectivities) lay the groundwork for joint appreciation of reality and for communication by symbols and language (Bruner 1975; Dore 1983). However, it must be noted that at this stage of development, in the first year, the 'symbols' have very limited freedom from expressive action. They are not the kind of sounds, or marks on pap«1, or products of technology or manufacture that can exist in many equivalent forms separate from the behavior that made them. All the gestures or expressions of intersubjectivity of a baby under nine months of age are actual ways of being or doing for another or for oneself. They are fixed firmly in the present and the 'presentation'; they rely upon their metacommunicative force, as live 'performances'.

Secondary Intersubjectivity:

Cooperative Understanding

Cooperative Play with Objects and 'Protolanguage' We have measured the development of cooperative awareness by means of a simple game of communication about how to use objects (Figure 4). Mothers were asked to get their babies to put three wooden dolls in a toy truck. Before nine months of age, the infants would play with the toys and enjoy presentations of them by the mother, but would not attend to the arbitrary instructions (Hubley and Trevarthen 1979; Trevarthen and Hubley 1978) (Plate 5—F, G, I-L). Soon after nine months, however, they were both able and willing to attend to, comply with, and comment about the actions instructed by the mother (Plate 6—M-O). A simultaneous development changed the way the infants combined vocalization and gestures to signal wishes, feelings, purposes, and experiences to their partners (Bates et al. 1975) (Plate 5—J-L; Plate 6—P). This behavior is the protolanguage of Halliday (Halliday 1975; Trevarthen 1987). It is not speech in a recognized 'mother tongue', though certain of the infant's vocalizations become repeated conventions in the family and the baby may crudely imitate the sound of certain words. Changes in the infant's cooperation as 'receiver' or 'listener' lead to large transformations in the mother's behavior as 'utterer'. Her spoken messages change in 'illocutionary force' (Grice 1968). She replaces questions and invitations with imperatives and directives (Trevarthen and Marwick 1986).

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728 Colwyn Trevarthen Joining with and assisting the direction of another person's interest are aided systematically by gestures of 'reaching' and 'pointing', these two forms of gesture being distinct from each other from early infancy (Trevarthen 1977, 1986b). Expression of 'comment' or evaluation of the 'topic' is conveyed largely by variation of the voice. Thus voice and gesture convey different parts of the 'act of meaning' (Halliday 1975). The organization of this two-channel system is flexible; either the gestural part or the vocal part can be codified protolinguistically. Thus at the age when a normal hearing child is mastering how to perform illocutionary acts by vocalizing in a speech-like way with the help of gestures, a deaf child in a signing family starts to pay attention to and imitate hand signs, using them appropriately to indicate wishes, interests, and purposes to companions (Bellugi et at. 1988; Newport and Meier 1985; Volterra 1981, 1986). In the second year the speaking child becomes less inclined to specify notions of language with the hands, and the deaf signing child uses the voice less as he or she learns signing with the hands. The two forms of expression do, of course, also require different forms of mutual orientation with other people, who must adjust to the child's preferred or best-functioning sensory mode. With appropriate presentation of large, clearly written words in games of communication, a one-year-old can even begin to learn to read, seeing symbols in the shared written shapes (Soderbergh 1981). The child's mind has acquired a general curiosity about signs and an interest in both giving and receiving their messages with cooperative others in any sufficiently clear form that is presented for sharing.

Learning a Vocabulary of Meaningful Actions The transition to protolanguage at around nine months adds significantly to the versatility and detachability of the signs created by the infant. The 'illocutionary force' of these 'acts of meaning' in protolanguage employs a particular gesture or sound-with-gesture to specify the 'object' of the message. Simultaneously controlling the intersubjective orientation and conveying a clear quality of interest, intention, and emotion vis-ä-vis the interests, intentions, and feelings of the 'other', the utterances of protolanguage (vocal in a speaking family or in the form of hand signs in a deaf-signing family) carry a clear referential burden (Figure 5). They express motivation for a communicative engagement about a specified thing, person, event, etc. (Bruner 1975; Dore 1983) (Plate 6—P).

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730 Colwyn Trevarthen Simultaneous with this increase in the content of protolanguage is a change in the way infants treat objects with which they are playing; this change in consciousness soon transforms their imagination even when they are playing alone (Trevarthen 1988). By comprehending that objects can have affordances, uses, interest created for or by another person—by someone showing 'how', or 'that', or 'what kind', etc.—a one-year-old is beginning to treat objects as having 'pretend' properties that go beyond single 'sensory-motor' explorations (secondary circular reactions or 'self-imitations') of what happens when manipulations are made (Plate 7). Before nine months, interest in manipulating play, no matter how complex or combinatorial, is closed about the effect on him or herself of what the infant is doing. The important exception is an object which someone else, such as a mother, is transforming in a play 'presentation' with a gloss of action and affect— with 'affective attunement' (Stern et al. 198S), matching or coupling expressive forms of movement to manipulative forms of movement Intersubjectivity and Infant Semiotics over the First Year From two months onward, infants demonstrate proficiency in direct engagements with the feelings expressed by other persons. Between six and nine months they will join in person-person-object games in which the interest is focused on the animation given to a toy by the mother, who strives to coordinate well with the infant's orientations, manipulations, and expressions of feeling. Here the mother acts as a 'transitional object' (Winnicott 1965) in a multiplicity of senses. After nine months, though, an infant can take the initiative and can make reference, in protolanguage or in cooperative action, to an object as it might interest another person (Figure 5). This is the germ of pretense in object use; it makes possible the learning of ways to reflect or reproduce what others do. It allows learning of a communicated 'how' (to act) or 'what' (a thing is) to begin. It will be clear, at this point, that all the significant developments in the first year are concerned with how the infant adjusts mentally to mental activities of the cooperative other. This is what is meant by a developing intersubjectivity. Proponents of the 'theory of mind approach' concentrate on signs that infants make their behavior relate to the awareness and intentionality of others (Bretherton et al. 1981; Leslie 1987; Stern 1985). Concentrating on clear signs of anticipation for what others can perceive or do, and on behavior directed to comply with, defy, cheat, etc. such consciousness or will, these psychologists are led to place a

Signs before speech 731 beginning of the infant's 'theory* of other minds (or 'interfacing' with other minds) at about nine months, or even in the second year when pretending (i.e., the 'deferred imitation' of Piaget 1962) takes clearer and more elaborate forms. But if the criterion of intersubjectivity is broadened to include emotional empathy and coordination of expressions with direct communicative value (including 'prespeech' and 'presigns'), then intersubjectivity can be observed all the way back to birth. I favor this latter approach, because 1 feel it provides a perspective in which to observe developmental change in human communication. The 'beginning' identified by some at the end of the first year, or by others in the second year, is in fact a transformation or 'metamorphosis' of something that was already there (Trevarthen 1979b). Close observation of trickery, jokery, naughtiness, 'mucking about', etc.— particularly from microanalysis of chance episodes captured on TV recordings— shows that before nine months, infants gain pleasure from a kind of 'play fighting' with their preferred playmates (Plate 1—A, M; Plate 2—B, J; Plate 3—G, K, L; Plate 4—Q). This is an important manifestation of intersubjective assertiveness that clearly paves the way to initiative in protolanguage. The very wide range of mannerisms, expressions, actions, and ritual performances that are 'shown off as 'jokes' or 'tricks' by infants between six and twelve months of age gives us a broad scope for interpretation of 'infant semiotics'. These are socio-dramatic posturings, clown expressions, musical performances (with rudimentary 'singing' and 'dancing'), conventional acts of etiquette, declamatory posturings, destructive and uncooperative actions, and many others. All these 'displays' increase in subtlety and complexity in the second year, but they start in the first. It should be emphasized that such acts of communication are not simply framed or 'scaffolded' by the partner, although they are learned at first by imitation in interaction. They are recreated by the child out of this favorable intersubjective learning situation. Gradually, the internalized imagination of roles, acts, tasks, etc. gains a spontaneous, self-creating life by means of which a child may make meanings in a play world when all alone. This gives the child entry to the world of 'fantasy play'. The Beginning of Cultural Awareness The nine- to twelve-month-old's awareness of a shared reality and its signification does not stop at compliances with instructions, or the performance of utterances and gestures in standard 'acts of meaning'. It soon leads to a selective retention of

732 Colwyn Trevarthen experiences about the ways in which other favorite persons use the world, and how they bring it to the child to be acted upon by them together. Imitations are guided by this interest on the part of the child in the other person's interests and acts, and memories of significant objects or events are retained because interest in them has been shared. The play of the one-year-old shows many preferences and skills that have been learned in communication or observed in company. It exhibits 'deferred imitation' of what other people do. The baby's knowledge of forms of behavior or uses of objects is taken up in communication and is ready to be communicated. Some instruments used in the home become of special interest (Plate 7). The child's attempts to act 'properly' with them are greeted with approval by parents, who praise both the interest and the 'cleverness' of the actions. These uses and meanings become frames for the perception of any new thing, and the child starts fantasy play in which all sorts of materials and objects are imagined to be useful as food, tools, dress, etc. The child also gains favorite possessions that become part of daily rituals. One-year-olds are starting to walk, and the increased mobility in the second year assists a much wider exploration and manipulation of the environment. But the most remarkable, most human developments in this time are those that build a shared cultural awareness, one that is profoundly influenced by what other people do, and by what they express in emotion, gesture, and speech.

Fantasy Play in the Second Year If an 18-month-old is presented with a collection of new but commonplace play objects that have meaning—dolls; clothes; model vehicles or miniature pieces of furniture, such as tables and chairs, a bath or a bed; implements like dishes, cups and saucers, knives, spoons and forks, combs, brushes and so on; books, pictures, pencils—these objects will be chosen and manipulated in a way that shows they have been recognized for what they 'properly' are (Trevarthen 1986b, 1988; Trevarthen and Marwick 1986) (Plate 7). The behavior of the child playing with toys in the presence of the mother reveals an ambivalence of orientation. The play may seem 'egocentric', because the child characteristically turns his or her back to the mother most of the time and may 'shrug off any recommendation she may offer as to what should be done with the toys, and may say 'No!' to her. But what the mother shows or says is picked

Signs before speech 733 up, and it does influence what the toddler attends to and plays with. The mother can help set up a shared pretend situation—giving the dolly a cup of tea, or a bath, etc.—and the child will cooperate to the extent of accepting a simple 'play frame' supplied by the mother. But the actions are not elaborated with much cooperation, and it is highly characteristic of one-and-a-half-year-olds to assert independence or separateness and to limit their own contribution to the ideas of play. Cooperation is better developed in fantasy play with the mother at two (Plate 7).

Plate 7. Using cultural skills. Basilie, 53 weeks—seeing the National Geographic on a shelf in the laboratory, Basilie asks for it, then goes through the pictures with mother's help. Basilie, 26 months—strongly right-handed, Basilie feeds the dog with a spoon and brushes her mother's hair. She has never seen these particular toys before, but recognizes their meanings and uses immediately. The child may fantasize and 'act out' behavior of a doll (e.g., smacking lips when giving the doll a drink), or the manipulation of imagined items of food or drink (pouring 'milk', passing 'cake'), or wipe imagined water off hands. The 'meaningful' use of the toys depends on such imagination. But the playful acts are

734 Colwyn Trevarthen rather disconnected and are supported erratically by attention flitting over the props. At this age most children have very little or no production of speech. Their knowledge of what things mean, or what they afford for communicable use, greatly exceeds what they can say. Comprehension of what the mother says is much more evident than it was a few months before, but it is dependent on 'the pragmatic and interpersonal context', which is to say that the child's grasp of the meaning of some names which others give to things, or some actions they describe verbally, depends on a richer mental grasp of what can be done with such things, and especially on how they (or things or actions like them) have been shared with others previously. A toddler will like to have favorite toys that are given by others and played with in their company and with their encouragement and support. Understanding of word- or sign-meaning is part of a more general, more extensive understanding of shared reality, understood because it is shared, sharing being a fundamental motivation for the child's mind (Figure S). An audio recording of the talk that accompanies a mother's play with her toddler reveals the importance of prosody and intonation in this communication (Ferrier 1985). It also reveals that the mother is identifying strongly with the child's imagination and apparent purposes. A mother's talk is given lively inflection, and the animation of her voice highlights shared moments of enjoyment, triumph, curiosity, surprise, difficulty, disappointment, annoyance, sadness, and so on, in clearly distinct ways. For his or her part, the child, while making only poorly articulated attempts at speech, controls a range of protolanguage vocalizations with subtle and appropriate intonation. Different messages (questions, declarations, imperatives, exclamations of varying emotion) are clearly conveyed by appropriate modulations of pitch, quality, and loudness. Gestural communication is also welldeveloped, both mother and child making and responding to a wide variety of expressive, deictic, and praxic movements of the hands that are coupled to body movements, posturings, and facial and vocal expressions. Their intersubjectivity is certainly rich and subtle, and they communicate in ways that bring their consciousness and understandings together.

Hand Preferences in Signing and in Meaningful Praxis An interesting feature is that, as children's manipulation of objects becomes ruled by shared conventions and semantic principles, a majority of them show an

Signs before speech 735 increasingly clear handedness. Most are right-handed for manipulative acts of meaning, for using implements, signs, etc., either in communication or for their private imaginative play (Trevarthen 1986b) (Plate 7). Ordinary 'sensory-motor' or exploratory play, unqualified by interpretations or recognitions that function in communication, does not show such clear asymmetry. Handedness is demonstrated by these observations to be connected with the psychological motive for communication, and not some peripheral sensory or motor feature; this is confirmed by the left-handed child who has a reverse preference, using the left hand for meaningful acts. Such a preference can be evident as early as six months after birth in the performance of learned gestures, even when all the family members who serve as models for such gestures are right-handed. It has been found that the development of manual asymmetry is connected to the development of vocal expressions in babbling, protolanguage, and speech. Individuals who have unclear laterality or who develop a clear laterality later tend to be slower in learning to speak. Such children are not necessarily impaired in intelligence—on the contrary, some may demonstrate exceptional gifts.

Self-Awareness on the Threshold of Fluent Speech A most interesting set of developments occur near the end of the second year, and these have been shown to be independent of large cultural differences in upbringing of young children. Although they have been attributed to a maturation in memory and cognition, their description strongly suggests that at the base of the new kind of behavior is a fundamental change in self-awareness related to the new understanding of cooperation and shared responsibility for meaningful interaction. Twenty-month-olds show a heightened anxiety about broken or defective things, about naughty (punishable) acts, and about potential criticism—especially from a stranger—about inability to understand something or do a prescribed task (Kagan 1982). I suggest that this manifestation of a more aware and vulnerable 'me' (in Mead's [1934] sense), a new self-consciousness, is connected to the great advance in vocabulary and self-assurance which the child will show after two. Most two-year-olds are talkers, and some can string together more than two words in well-made sentences. They are also usually adept at little games of fantasy which can be supported by an appreciative and cooperative partner. Acting

736 Colwyn Trevarthen out songs, simple dancing, theatrical poses, etc., and imitating roles and actions start to be dominant components of their play.

The Start of Fantasy Play with Peers Toddlers between one and two years old begin to demonstrate an ability to recreate in fantasy some of the meaningful performances they have picked up in play with adults and older siblings (Mueller 1979; Stambak et al. 1985). This ability is not surprising, given the examples of recreated performances we have recorded in the first year in mother-infant play. In the second year the imaginative or fantasy content of play with the mother begins to grow, strengthened by developments in the child's thinking and memory. The connection between relationships of affection and trust and the development of shared imagination and cooperation which began in the first year continues into the second year. Thus a toddler's imaginative play is more discriminating in the company of a person to whom the child is attached by a bond of affection and familiarity, play with the mother having more imaginative structure than play when the child is alone. Play with peers in a play-group setting has considerable limitations for children under two. It has been described as 'parallel', and it may take the form of imitation (Nadel 1986; Nadel-Brulfeit and Baudonniere 1982), groups of toddlers moving in 'clusters' (Mueller 1979; Mueller and Vandell 1979). Given the opportunity, they may select similar objects to support a simple action they are replicating (e.g., all walking around holding up an umbrella, or climbing on a table and jumping down). Elementary cooperations, or complementary actions of give-andtake, etc., may appear in play with objects early in development, even between infants around the middle of the first year (Rayna, personal communication), though their capacity to support one another's actions is, of course, limited.

Preschoolers' Imagination and Cooperation in Play At about three years of age, most children grow into more self-possessed, more knowing and observant, and much more articulate members of the family. They are also taking increasing interest in life and people outside the home, and can recognize and begin to participate with more awareness in social occasions like

Signs before speech 737 shopping, church, going to a game or a theatre show, taking a walk, and so on. Being masters of language, they can talk with others about non-present events, especially with well-known people with whom they share many life experiences. They can discuss things that happened at another time and another place, and can follow a story about doings and situations that have to be imagined. The great body of research on early language is full of evidence for the entry of a child of this age into a symbolic and cultural world. Anthropology has given less attention to how young children enter into cultural awareness and cooperation by their own efforts; yet there is an abundance of material available about the creativity of children and their fascination for meanings, roles, etc. in the Held of peer play. When pairs of nursery-school children of the same age are playing together, the cooperation in their role-playing and setting up of imaginative themes depends on many factors, but the two main factors are their age (Heatherington et al. 1979; Parten 1932; Shugar and Bokus 1986) and their friendship (Doyle et al. 1980; Gottman 1983; Hartup 1983; Howes 1983). A three-year-old, when playing alone, may display a rich imagination and create many reproductions of meaningful dramatic and technical performances that derive from the world he or she knows best. But the same child may have difficulty sharing this world with a child who has a different home, or with an older sibling who knows a lot more about the world. Only gradually over the next two years, particularly around the fourth birthday, do peers in a nursery school begin to systematically adjust and combine their line of invention to create a single frame of play (Garvey 1982; Logotheti 1989; Shugar 1988). This kind of shared fantasy play has attracted the interest of many researchers concerned with language development and with the grasp of cultural knowledge in dramatic or pretend form. However, this is a field which is still reluctant to make a theoretical synthesis, the thinking of most experts being fragmented by attempts to explain cognitive development or the acquisition of language. Five-year-olds are at a peak of inventive freedom in fantasy play (Harper and Huie 1985). Four-year-olds are just starting to develop it, at the same time as they gain skills in intersubjective negotiation. Cooperation depends on adjustment to the separate feelings, experiences, and ideas of another person on the basis of a mutual desire to share. This development of communication between speaking preschoolers, from 'coaction' to 'cooperation' (Logotheti 1989), bears comparison with the change described for infants about nine months of age when they begin to orient systematically to the mother and start to cooperate in performance of a joint

738 Colwyn Trevarthen task (Hubley and Trevarthen 1979). The preschoolers enter a new plane of symbolic awareness because they have begun to share interpretations with a person of similar level of experience, and similarly observant of the culture around them both.

Conclusions A rational philosopher will approach the problem of symbolic thought logically, trying to understand how thinking is constructed inside our head and in freedom from the practical problems of moving about and acting on the world. He will note that symbols of a formal language stand as a shorthand code for ideas and thoughts; that they can confer great economy on reasoning and memory and help in the building of self-consistent or coherent and condensed patterns of thought. But, as Vygotsky (1962) taught us, the inevitable and natural function of symbols is to be found first in communication, not in the thinking of one head (Figure S). We think and remember symbolically because we communicate symbolically, /nfrasubjective processes of reflective thought—solving problems, remembering causal relationships, and planning strategies of action—appear to grow out of /nfersubjective exchange, in which motives for consciousness and action in different individuals are linked up and mutually adjusted. It follows that a general and complete definition of 'symbol' must specify how motives are articulated, perceived, and interrelated between subjects. A developmental approach clarifies this problem, which is very difficult to analyze from adult thinking. Description of how young children behave as they develop toward mastery of symbols brings evidence that there is in each and every one of them a natural motivation for intersubjective relatedness and mixing of thoughts with an 'other'. Child and companions engage and mutually adjust their minds. First, emotions are transmitted between a newborn infant and an appropriately oriented and receptive partner. This process, we now know, may begin before birth. Rapid development in early months of cognitive mastery by exploring with the senses and by manipulating objects occurs after the expression of subtle communication in 'protoconversation'. In this way the child can, from the outset of the epigenetics of consciousness, receive guidance and evaluation of his or her own interests and acts by reference to the mental states of others.

Signs before speech 739 Before the end of the first year the infant, now practiced in sharing the tempo and quality of action with caretakers, begins to inquire systematically about what a partner in play is doing with objects. This allows communication about how to cooperate in performance of a joint task, the goal or product of which may be some completely artificial and arbitrary way of moving or combining objects—a way that can have been chosen by the partner on the basis of experience and a wider interpretation far beyond what the infant can comprehend. The child is deliberately attaching to this greater understanding. At this stage an infant, unable to speak, can refer not merely emotionally to the affective values of objects or events in shared experience, but also practically and cognitively. The child's consciousness and intentions can 'piggyback' on at least some of the ideas and purposes of the more knowledgeable other. The special helpfulness of an affectionate parent's behavior in such early cooperative play undoubtedly guides the child toward symbolic awareness. Indeed, infant and parent are clearly equipped to build the cooperation from both sides. Symbols And their importance and usefulness in this intuitive sharing of information about an 'interpreted reality'. It should be noted and emphasized that the referent reality in this early enactive proto-language is not conceived in any scientific sense as 'objective'. It is not sought because it is factually or empirically real in ways that are independent of the communication, but because it is a 'meaningful interpretation' of experience qualified by psychological (subjective) processes of interest and purposeful action in the communicating subjects. It is part of what Margaret Donaldson (1978) called a 'human sense' of the world, a world perceived in a dual, or communal, perspective. Protosymbolic behaviors, the jokes and 'showing off, which we have illustrated in infants six to twelve months of age, have that peculiar intermediate status of private or family signs—they refer to the mutual involvement with close friends in making 'interesting' acts of expression. They are metacommunication with inherent 'pretense'. Often learned by some kind of imitation or training, they are reproduced by the infant spontaneously in a new context or at a later time, displaced to 'represent' a moment of agreed interest and a shared and shown 'pleasure in knowing'. The 'cleverness' often attributed to these actions lies not in the problems of cognitive mastery or invention which they solve, but in their recognized appropriateness as child-initiated performances for exchange. A baby at this age playing alone can express joy in success, consternation at failure, or surprise at an unexpected happening, as if in play with a friend. In this way even solitary, so-called

740 Colwyn Trevarthen

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