The Sign

The Sign

Derrida pointed out that “sign” is an inextricably dualist and therefore metaphysical concept, being both “intelligible” and “sensible” and therefore in need of deconstruction. The question then is whether you want to see this as a problem that needs to be addressed. Saussure’s distinction between signifier and signified, the type/token distinction, Frege’s sense vs. reference all maintain this dualism. Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra is in a way a resolution of this dualism, along with the dualism of Marx’s distinction between “use value” and “exchange value”—just like exchange value swallows up use value, the signifier assimilated the signified so that reality is replaced by hyper-reality, a world completely generated by signs and comprised of simulacra. But Baudrillard’s resolution is a dystopia. Even Peirce’s tripartite distinction between icon, index and symbol reproduces this dualism, because while the “icon” would seem to be a natural, self-evident sign, the similarity between sign and referent is in fact not “obvious” and is culture-dependent, just as different languages have different sounds for a dog’s bark. And the “symbol” is the sign that takes on its meaning through “convention” or “agreement,” which returns us to the same place, Saussure’s “arbitrariness”—how did we all come to agree that this sound would “mean” and “refer” to this. Gans, as well, accepts the dualism of the sign as having a material and immaterial or transcendent component, as the immaterial, transcendent, invisible “side” of the sign corresponds to the originary paradox wherein the meaning and the referent of the sign both pre-exist and are created by the emergent human community. But Gans, without repeating this too many times that I’m aware of, has defined “God” as the word for which sense and referent are identical—the meaning of the word “God” is the reference to the being God. The implication of this is that the word or, more precisely, the name “God” anchors the entire linguistic system—every language, really any discourse, would have to have some word that unites sense and reference, signifier and signified, icon and symbol, in this way. Denying such words is really just another way of affirming them. This points to an interesting lacuna in Anna Wierzbicka’s natural semantic primes, which doesn’t include the word “God,” I presume precisely because “God” is really a name and the various ways of invoking deities in the various languages can’t be determined to be the “same” according to the linguistic protocols Wierzbicka has adopted. This suggests that linguistic centrality of the name of God, which includes, embodies and resolves the paradox of the sign, should really serve a similar function, but to different ends, as Derrida’s deconstruction, that is, of revealing where a given sign system “arbitrarily,” that is culturally and historically, has come to resolve its foundational paradoxes by privileging one set of terms over another. What strengthens this suggestion is another, as far as I know seldom repeated assertion of Gans that “every word is the Name-of-God.” I’ve never seen Gans explore this claim, but I think that it must mean that every word, in the singular, irreducible way it participates in a given utterance, does, in however a distanced or mediated way, what the aborted gesture of appropriation did on the originary scene. Here, we’d have a distinction but no longer a duality—the word is itself, a single, definable word within a linguistic system, a word which has various uses that distinguish it from other words within the system, while its “destiny,” we might say, within any utterance is to sustain the center, to “mean” by invoking the participation of all listeners in a centered presence. We could use the use-mention distinction to make sense of this—when we use a word, it’s the Name-of-God, characterized by the unity of sense and reference, signifier and signified; it’s only when we mention it, to make a study of language, that these distinctions emerge. That suggests that the dualities are artifacts of literacy, but, as David Olson likes to insist, the constructions of literacy can only make explicit what is already implicit in language. In this case, the origin of the linguistic dualities would lie in the rigors of ritual, where the question is one of performing a ritual, including its linguistic component, correctly, on the one hand, and performing other than according to custom, on the other, with potentially devastating consequences. The dualities of the sign, then, have their origins in the expulsion of the member of the community who causes the ritual to fail—any student with grammatical issues, accustomed to having his paper filled with menacing red ink, could, I think, be convinced that his little ostracism has such roots.

This hypothetical retracing of the dualisms of modern linguistics and philosophy allows us to revisit the otherwise rather bland assertion that signs have their meaning as a result of “social agreement.” We already have the paradox here that the only way of arriving at such an agreement requires a pre-existing agreement—a paradox pointed out by Rousseau and then Claude Levi-Strauss, leading to the logical, if equally paradoxical conclusion that language must have emerged all at once. Gans’s originary hypothesis is, of course, the solution to this paradox, but in that case it should also enable us to resolve the paradoxes in the word “sign.” One problem caused by the metaphysical dualism of “sign” is that it insufficiently distinguishes between human and animal and even non-organic “communication” or “exchange of information.” It is very easy—it’s the path of least resistance, especially in the wake of the cybernetic revolution—to treat the entire universe as a semiotic system, with human signification being qualitatively no different than, say the “exchange” of pheromones that initiates the mating sequence of a pair of insects. Peirce’s “indexical” sign reaches back into the non-human in this way, and it would be possible to analyze the iconic and symbolic as more complex articulations of indexical signs. This would make it much easier to “handle” and to justify handling humans in any “Great Reset” one has in mind; for example, vast projects of carbon minimization and extraction, or of social control and immunology. The only argument against this, aside from reactive invocations of some threatened human essence, would be to show that human sign use is irreducible to the universe conceived as vast flows of information. If the supposedly “transcendent” dimension of the sign could be shown to be explicable and, more importantly, predictable, on a completely indexical model, the traditional defense of the singularity of the human collapses.

I think a better framing of “signification” can start from one of Wierzbicka’s primes: the word “same.” When we speak about the “meaning” or “sense” of a word, what we are saying is that it is the same word in its different uses. This “sameness” is verified, or affirmed, or authenticated, along with each use—this is the “Name-of-God” implicit in every utterance. Then the immaterial, invisible, transcendent dimension of the sign is rerouted to a continual regathering of the community around its center. The constative is brought back into the performative, to draw upon another tradition of modern linguistic philosophy, speech act theory. To mean something is to “insist” that what you have uttered will be insisted to be the “same” by other language users in situations that will likewise be determinable to be the “same.” But the same what? To say the same “sign” or “word” is to land us back in the same dilemmas. Since this sameness is always constructed, selected, “taken” as much as “given,” we can take an absolutely indispensable concept from modern, scientific thought and say: the same sample. Taking and treating samples might be seen as a reductive procedure: this living animal, with its entire species being, meaning within human communities, evolutionary history and so on is to be treated as a cluster of cells which we wish to observe under controlled conditions to answer specific questions. But this practice is true of all language use—we never “grasp” the complete “richness” of a given phenomenon—we always select and single out that which is urgent to us in the present. Taking a sample is actually irreducibly human—we could say that one snail following in the slime tracks of another for mating purposes is responding to “signs,” but we couldn’t say it’s taking a sample, separating out and setting aside a part from a whole in order to know the whole.

If I point, or speak a word, or a sentence, or write a book, that’s a sample—a sample of language in general, a sample of a particular region in language, defined according to discipline, period, genre, or anything else, in accord with the needs of some inquiry. The sample stands in for that larger “population,” metonymically, which is to say, first of all, indexically, but insofar as it is made to serve as a good or representative sample, also iconically, and, insofar as the sample has to be “treated” or “carved up” in a certain way, according to certain rules, to make it function iconically, then also symbolically, in some agreed upon manner. So, this accounts for the sign’s/sample’s relation to the system of signs/samples, and the users of signs/samples. As for the linguistic sample’s relation to something extra linguistic, now we have to speak GA rather than Peircean. Insofar as a sample of language distinguishes itself from the larger population of language, which is to say, from all other samples, it does so by directing our attention, ostensively, to something in the world which is now itself turned into a sample. Let’s say that a book directs your attention to a certain corner of some scholarly discourse, making “original” statements that take on their meaning from the distinction the book makes between these statements and some set of inherited statements, which they aim at displacing. Let’s say it’s a new interpretation of some historical event—the remains, the indications, the ramifications of that event, in memories, artifacts, primary sources, consequences, and so on can now all be examined in new ways—they become signs or, samples, now of that historical event considered along these new lines. Let’s take a more familiar example of a “sample”—something you would look at through a biologist’s, chemists, medical practitioner’s, etc. microscope—something that has been set up, prepared, treated in specific ways so as to make something visible. Your first question will be something like “what am I looking at?,” and the answer will be some kind of sign (“that dark circular mass moving slightly on the top left side…), and this sign or sample will direct your attention to what has now been converted into a sign or sample, as that “mass” is now a sample of the kind of thing one looks at in this way, under these conditions, for this purpose. A disciplinary space, which is really any linguistic space, generates transformational samples of this kind—samples that convert what has not yet been differentiated from some whole into samples of that and other wholes, considered in some way structured by the space. Every sample both represents and is represented.

We can, of course, only replace the word “sign” with the word “sample” because we inherit established scientific traditions that give the word “sample” the meaning we now exploit. Any word, including “sign,” will carry its history along with it, and it’s better to be explicit about that. We can speak of “samples” precisely because of the very conditions which make an unproblematic relation between sign, mind and referent impossible—the massive displacement of places and people under what we can call the paradoxically centrifugal centralizing tendencies of modernity. From a gradation of names marking embedded relationships, each social “particle” has multiple and changing relations to the center. The epoch of “data” emerges for precisely this reason—think of what had to be recorded in, say, the records of the local parish in 11th century Europe—births, deaths, marriages, at most—and go through the growing agglomeration of record keeping and statistics that follow from the absolutist monarchs through the vast bureaucratic paperwork of the 19th through the mid-20th century, now all, multiplied immensely, gathered up into the Cloud. There’s no way of working through this vast storage of information other than through sampling and searching. So, we’re all samples sampling. Like a lot of us now, I imagine, since it’s so easy to search the etymologies and histories of words, I do that for words that become important to my thinking, and so I’ll point out that “sample” is really, not surprisingly, a variant of “example,” which in Latin had meanings relevant to the iconic nature of the sign (like “portrait” and “pattern”) but can ultimately be traced back to a Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to take,” or “distribute.” So, using the word “sample” to replace “sign” retrieves an originary understanding of the sign as a mode and object of distribution. The originary event is a sample of humanity because all members of the group became sampling samples there. I’ll also add that a sample is a “substitute” for the whole, or, in terms of mimetic theory, an “emissary” that we now preserve and amplify rather than sacrificing. As a cultural-linguistic strategy, using “sample” in this way to both displace “sign” and crowd out or assimilate other meanings of sample creates an overlay onto scientifically informed discourse that, first, makes that discourse more rigorous (any conclusion claiming to be scientific, indeed, any claim to knowledge, must account for the relation between sample and population in its presentation of the results of its inquiries); while also making that discourse more embedded in the human designing of the human that’s always implicated in technology and science. In other words, we talk to (and as) scientists and engineers as people who as are always making meaning, rather than doing something outside of meaning. If you’re working with samples, you’re thoroughly immersed in sign usage, or sampling. And I’ll conclude with a quick mention of the musical meaning of sampling, which involves taking a piece of recorded music from one context and repurposing it for another, and which completely relevant to the sampling of the word “sample” I’m attempting here.