POSTMODERNISM AND THE THEORY OF SIGNIFICANCE

by Benjamin Ashley Smith B.A., The University of West Florida, 2004

A thesis submitted to The Department of Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Interdisciplinary Humanities College of Arts and Sciences The University of West Florida In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts 2007

The thesis of Benjamin Ashley Smith is approved:

Douglas B. Low, Ph.D., M.L.S., Committee Member

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Nicholas P. Power, Ph.D., Committee Member

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Terry J. Prewitt, Ph.D., Committee Chair

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Accepted for the Department:

Nicholas P. Power, Ph.D., Chair

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Accepted for the College:

Jane S. Halonen, Ph.D., Dean

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Accepted for the University:

Richard S. Podemski, Ph.D., Dean of Graduate Studies

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Writing about postmodernism is not easy. Having now tried, I am not sure it should be attempted. I am in debt to those whose patience and collaboration helped see this thesis to completion. It was only possible through the help of my mentors, teachers, friends, and family. I express my gratitude to Terry Prewitt, Douglas Low, Nicholas Power, Dirk Dunbar, Robert Philen, Stacy Monahan, Jonathan Means, Charles Myers, Kate Terrell, Angelina Patten, and all others who have read and commented on my work. I also thank the many colleagues with whom I’ve had the pleasure of conversation bearing more or less directly on my work: John Deely, Vincent Colapietro, and the members of the Semiotic Society of America who responded to my presentations at the 29/30th (combined) and 31st annual meetings.

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EPIGRAPH

What, then, is the postmodern? What place does it or does it not occupy in the vertiginous work of the questions hurled at the rules of image and narration? It is undoubtedly a part of the modern. JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?”

[I]n modern philosophy, the conundrum about the reality of the “external world”, the insolubility of the problem of how in theory to get beyond the privacy of the individual mind, springs directly from the reduction of signification to representation. JOHN DEELY Four Ages of Understanding

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PREFACE Progress in the history of philosophy can only be hindered when authors include in their writing such absurdities as references to “Plato (1992)”. Yet many style guides promote this practice, obscuring the origins of works cited. A better style guide would make them clear. In what follows, I make use of the style sheet of the Semiotic Society of America.1 It makes use of a “historical layering of references”, such that all dates for works, given within parenthetical citations, refer to dates within the lifetimes of the authors. These are the dates that appear under the author’s name on the references pages, although reprint information, and all other information pertaining to the time and place of publication of the original, relevant translations and reprints, and especially the “access volume” appears as well. Within citations, the original year of publication of the work cited and then the relevant page numbers in the access volume, separated by a colon, follow an author’s last name. The SSA style sheet also dictates that, for the sake of logic, punctuation be placed outside of quotation marks except when it is present in the text being quoted.

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The full style sheet can be found in Semiotics 1984 (Deely, ed. 1985: 717-39).

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.........................................................................................iii EPIGRAPH ................................................................................................................. iv PREFACE .................................................................................................................... v LIST OF FIGURES.................................................................................................... vii ABSTRACT..............................................................................................................viii INTRODUCTION

THE VERY NOTIONS OF “MODERNISM” AND “POSTMODERNISM”......................... 1

CHAPTER I.

IDEALIST MODERNISM AND SEMIOTIC POSTMODERNISM IN DEELY’S FOUR AGES OF UNDERSTANDING............................................................. 8 A. The “Way of Ideas”............................................................... 9 B. The “Way of Signs” ............................................................ 14 C. The Basics of Semiotics ...................................................... 19

CHAPTER II.

THE FRONTIER BETWEEN MODERN PHILOSOPHY AND POSTMODERN TIMES ....................... 24 A. Signification in Saussure’s “Semiology” ............................. 24 B. Postmodernism as Semiotics?.............................................. 30

CHAPTER III.

PUTATIVE POSTMODERNISM ........................................... 36 A. Radical Incommensurability in Foucault ............................. 41 B. Incommensurability and the “Postmodern Condition” ......... 53

REFERENCES........................................................................................................... 65

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LIST OF FIGURES Figure

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1. The Saussurean Analysis of Discourse ............................................................ 25 2. “Sound-Image” and “Concept” Chains, after Saussure (1906-11) ................................................................................. 26 3. Distinction of Signs by Mutual Opposition, after Saussure (1906-11) ................................................................................. 27 4. Intersubjectivity on the Saussurean Model ...................................................... 48 5. Incommensurability on the Saussurean Model................................................. 49

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ABSTRACT

POSTMODERNISM AND THE THEORY OF SIGNFICANCE Benjamin Ashley Smith

Commentators often construe postmodernism as a consequence of the modern “crisis of representation”. This makes it a troublesome philosophical notion because philosophy is often understood to center on representations. According to John Deely (2001), the theory of significance called “semiotics” explains representation and thus surpasses modernism. In this thesis, I critique Deely’s account of postmodernism as semiotics. I defend Deely’s claim that semiotics is the postmodern theory of significance, but argue that his account is exclusivist and incomplete in part. I also propose the label “putative postmodernism” to name the typical construal of postmodernism. I explore, in terms of semiotics, its expression in the work of Michel Foucault and Jean-François Lyotard, though I conclude that putative postmodernism has only a superficial unity.

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INTRODUCTION THE VERY NOTIONS OF “MODERNISM” AND “POSTMODERNISM” Postmodernism is a troublesome philosophical notion. On a well-known construal, postmodernism ensues from the modern “crisis of representation” (Rabinow 1986; Rorty 1979). In philosophy, the crisis of representation is taken for either: (1) a consequence of the typical problems of modern philosophy: the problem of solipsism and the problem of the external world; or (2) a consequence of the problems of accounting for the significance of language: its truth and meaning. The common understanding of postmodernism is that it is a sort of relativism, peculiar to postindustrial societies, on which representations (linguistic and otherwise) are disconnected from what they represent. This either erases their meaning or makes it colloquial. The disconnection is accepted because its opposite seems impossible. Modernism epitomized foundationalist rationality, which attempts to ground the significance of representations. But modernism failed. Its failure leaves the philosopher no method besides pastiche and no attitude besides ironic detachment. Philosophy, insofar as its task is conceptual, must either come to an end or continue only without taking itself—or anything else—too seriously (Sheehan 2006). Postmodernism, construed in this way, is criticized and even ridiculed from many sides. It is also widely misunderstood and widely ignored. I suspect that these

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responses to the very notion of postmodernism follow in part from the sweeping claims postmodernism allegedly makes. It seems to treat the whole history of Western thought in terms of the crisis of representation, establishing itself as that history’s end. It plays fast and loose with the history of philosophy. I share with the “critical” philosopher of history a desire to avoid “playing fast and loose” with history in this way, i.e., by imposing periods and directions on history that may be more willful than honest.2 I also share the widespread unease regarding this so-called “postmodernism”. Regardless, I think that “postmodernism” names a legitimate endeavor. Indeed, on the construal I defend, postmodernity is current, and it demands our attention; the history of philosophy leads to postmodernity as its contemporary situation. Postmodernism demands our attention because it emphasizes the mistakes of modern philosophy, and postmodernism moves beyond them. However, it will become obvious that what I mean by postmodernism differs from the putative construal of postmodernism outlined above. How can one speak in terms of “modernity” and “postmodernity” without “playing fast and loose” with history? One can do so by narrowing the playing field. Because my concern is their place in the history of philosophy, I approach modernity and postmodernity to uncover their philosophical implications. I characterize them, as historical periods, in terms of their prevailing philosophical systems—their “-isms”, if you will. Trivially, modernity is the era of modernism. Likewise, the “postmodern” is

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I use William Dray’s terminology (1993), on which the “critical” philosopher of history stands over against the “speculative” philosopher of history, who upholds some variant of what Popper (1957), an exemplar of the “critical” approach, called “historicism”.

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whatever is peculiar to postmodernity and, accordingly, inculcated with postmodernism. Determining postmodernism’s meaning for the history of philosophy thus depends on a nontrivial characterization of the explicit and implicit systems of theories, arguments, conclusions, and conceptual norms prevailing in modernity and postmodernity, their doctrines. Construing modernity and postmodernity in terms of doctrine will allow me to understand them without digressing into general considerations of the philosophy of history. And further, it will allow me to evade reliance on such troublesome notions as paradigm, episteme, Weltanschauung, zeitgeist, ideology, or style. I have no interest in posing postmodernism as a “spirit of the times”. I don’t mean to disparage, prima facie, the use of such concepts, but an investigation of their legitimacy or efficacy would take me away from my point. So I will engage these notions only whenever and insofar as they relate to doctrinal points. One might say that “doctrine” is at least somewhat as troublesome as the alternatives just named. Why do I want to pursue the history of philosophy in terms of doctrine? I do not mean to draw on the word’s religious connotations. My reasons for using it are twofold: First, I intend rather to make use of its reference to a body of theories and norms advanced, more or less explicitly, by a group or the representatives of a group of thinkers. Second, I admit the influence of John Deely, whose method, in his epic Four Ages of Understanding (2001), approaches the history of philosophy in the same way. For Deely (ibid: 489-99), philosophy is doctrinal because of its difference from science on the one hand and religion on the other. More speculative than the hypotheses of science, but better grounded in experience than the dogmas of

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religion, philosophy inhabits a middling position whose concerns are well named by “doctrine”: the conceptual norms that guide a thinker’s inquiries.3 Deely’s (2001) work itself forms a doctrinal motivation for the present endeavor. Four Ages of Understanding presents, as its subtitle informs us, “the first postmodern survey of philosophy from ancient times to the turn of the twenty-first century”. It is a survey accomplished from a certain position; Deely’s postmodernism is defined by an abiding interest in semiotics, the theory of significance. His “modernity” (ibid: 487ff.) is the temporary deviation of philosophy into a cul-de-sac called the “Way of Ideas”. “Postmodernity” will, on Deely’s account (ibid: 611ff.), constitute the return of philosophy to its historical course along the “Way of Signs”. Thus Deely offers what I will characterize as a continuist view of the history of philosophy. His “postmodernism” continues the development of the theory of signs, which, as he tells it, was the central concern of Latin philosophy falling between the “ancient” and “modern” “ages”. An adequate understanding of signs, he claims, was the needed but missing ingredient in the modern attempt to ground knowledge. Following Deely’s account helps to further narrow my approach to the very notions of modernism and postmodernism. I will examine them in terms of their doctrines, but more specifically in terms of the doctrine of signs or the theory of significance. Working through, in Chapter 1, Deely’s account of modernity and postmodernity will show the efficacy of considering them in terms of the theory of

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Deely’s discussion of the doctrinal approach to philosophy is well worth the reader’s time. I will not reproduce it here.

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significance. Modernism fails for it, but a viable postmodernism by contrast will develop on an adequate account of it. Yet, Deely’s version of the history of philosophy will not pass uncriticized, because though compelling it is uneven. His application of this continuity to contemporary philosophy yields an exclusivist result: whatever recent philosophy fails to deal explicitly with sign theory falls short of a thoroughgoing postmodernism. This excludes the analytic and continental philosophy comprising the mainstream of contemporary American and European philosophy. Deely dismisses it as the misguided offspring of logical positivism, accusing it of the failures of Cartesian, modern philosophy (2001: 580-4). Yet, as I will show in Chapter 2, Deely’s own position—a rather extreme one with respect to other semioticians4—differs not so much in form and substance from positions espoused by certain Anglo-Americans but rather in terminology and historical outlook. Deely’s picture contrasts with the common view on which “postmodernism” means an emphasis on discontinuity between modernity and our contemporary situation. The definition of postmodernism as semiotics denies legitimacy to the doctrines of those whom Deely labels “would-be” postmodernists (2001: 611) and who are associated with the movement. Populating this list of postmodernist “would-bes”, such thinkers as Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault emphasize pluralism, difference, and discontinuity in knowledge, interpretation, and

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Analytic philosophy has not always been excluded from semiotics. Jaakko Hintikka, for example, delivered the keynote lecture at the 10th Annual Meeting of the Semiotic Society of America on 25 October 1985.

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history. I call the position that Deely opposes “putative postmodernism”. According to putative postmodernism, the contemporary situation of philosophy (along with the social and political sciences and perhaps even the natural sciences) is radically different from its past situations; and this new situation is rather diagnosed as a “condition” (Lyotard 1979) marked by an indefatigable, pervasive, and principled pluralism. Deely suggests that the putative postmodernists uphold the suppositions of modernism in treating representation and signification. It is their adherence to the modern theory of significance that denies them a legitimate postmodernism. However, a careful reading of Lyotard (1974, 1979, 1982) and Foucault (1966, 1969, 1984) shows that this group of “would-bes” has only a superficial unity. Foucault, I will argue in Chapter 3, holds closely to the modern theory of significance. He may be considered the prototypical putative postmodernist. Lyotard, however, despite certain affinities with Foucault, cannot be dismissed on the same grounds. His work demands the attention of one who would approach postmodernism in terms of the theory of significance. For the sake of being comprehensive, finally, I should note that both putative postmodernism and Deely’s differ from a view of the history of philosophy on which modernity hasn’t ended and on which postmodernism is ignored entirely. Here we find thinkers like Martin Schönfeld (2003), for example, who demarcates the present era of philosophy by Kant’s (1781) ushering in modernity with the Critique of Pure Reason. On this kind of view, postmodernism is ignored because it is considered a mere response to an encompassing modernity, making it less a postmodernism and more a reactive modernism. I will not take up a critique of Schönfeld’s position, because it is a

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non-starter; we as post-Kantians will be, simply, modern. But this assertion is no answer; it avoids the very question, which I think is worth asking. So, let us ask it. What is postmodernism, in terms of the theory of significance?

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CHAPTER I IDEALIST MODERNISM AND SEMIOTIC POSTMODERNISM IN DEELY’S FOUR AGES OF UNDERSTANDING John Deely’s Four Ages of Understanding (2001) is the only history of philosophy to focus on the development of the understanding of signs. This yields a markedly different story of the history of philosophy than is often told. The usual lacuna between Aristotle and Descartes is filled with more than the usual summaries of Augustine, Aquinas, and Ockham. Deely’s treatment of the “Latin” age, as he calls it (being the second “age” of philosophy, preceded by the “ancient” and succeeded by the “modern” and “postmodern”), is nothing short of revolutionary. Deely succeeds in showing that the centuries between ancient and modern times were not “Dark Ages” but were, instead, a time of progress in philosophical understanding. This is an indispensable contribution of Deely’s work, but my interest lies not in recounting his history of Latinity.5 Here is the relevant point: On Deely’s thesis, the Latin age comprises the successful, mainstream development of philosophy until it was abandoned during the 5

I leave it to the reader to brave Deely’s ample volume for the weight of evidence embodied in his account of Latinity, summarized in this understatement (2001: 738): To the medievals, then, we are mainly indebted for our current notion of “sign”, and for the threads of semiotic consciousness that Charles S. Peirce picked up in his work, the weaving together of which would launch the postmodern and contemporary development of semiotics.

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modern age. During this time, the Latins developed the doctrine of signs, called in hindsight “semiotics”,6 a complex and efficacious theory of significance that informs the understanding of perception, interpretation, and knowledge. This tradition culminated in John Poinsot, who published his masterpiece, the Tractatus de Signis (1632), during Descartes’ lifetime, in fact, after the writing of the Rules for the Direction of Mind (1628) and before the appearance of Discourse on the Method (1637). The import of Latinity, according to Deely, is that it had discovered and progressed along the decisive way for philosophy, the “Way of Signs”, which pursues an understanding of the action of signifying relations and establishes a viable approach to philosophy’s problems. Postmodernity is ushered in, Deely says, when Charles Sanders Peirce rediscovers and recommences on this Way. With this recognition, we stand on the cusp of postmodernity, the Way of Signs beckoning. In this chapter, I intend first to work through Deely’s account on its own terms, and then to bring out the salient points. The “Way of Ideas” How does philosophy go awry between Latinity and postmodernity? Modernity began with a split, the divergence of science and philosophy, Deely explains (2001: 487ff.). Modern science differed from what came before it by pursuing knowledge guided by faithfulness to its objects, rather than to the texts of Aristotle. Philosophy, with the success of science in mind, and ignoring the inexorably doctrinal nature of

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See Deely 2006.

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philosophy, likewise discarded the scholastic tradition, seeking in its own domain the fruits of Enlightenment. Indeed, the beginning of modernity is marked, Deely argues, where philosophy departed from the direction of a millennium of Latin thought by taking the “Way of Ideas”. The abandonment owes to Descartes (1641, e.g.), who posed knowledge in terms of ideas, the subject’s thoughts of the world, and who ignored or was otherwise ignorant7 of the success of Latin philosophy.8 Descartes began with methodological doubt, reduced all belief to two apodictic propositions—“I think, therefore I am” and “God is no deceiver”—and on their basis sought to reconstruct all of knowledge by moving from certainty to certainty. His separation, however, of “thinking self” (imbued with these innate and certain ideas) from “extended” matter was troubled by the problem of their interaction.9 Locke (1690) avoided this question when he founded the opposing, empiricist position, asserting that minds form knowledge not on the basis of certain, innate ideas but rather from the senses alone. He restricted the entire action of the world on the senses to brute interaction of the kind studied by the new, mathematical physics. Accordingly, he called quantifiable properties of things “primary”, distinguishing them from “secondary” qualities, which by contrast seemed, at best, real only by derivation from the primary ones and, at worst, illusory and misleading.

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“Blithely unaware”, Deely tells us (2001: 520). But take note as well of the results of Fransisco Suarez’s being taken by the moderns as definitive of Latin philosophy (Deely 2001: 500-2). 9 Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia first identified the problem in her correspondence with Descartes. The correspondence is collected in Shapiro 2007. 8

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Yet, the question Locke avoided arose again when Berkeley (1710) pointed out that we cannot know primary qualities by themselves because the alleged secondary qualities continually accompany and intertwine with the primary ones in our ideas, showing the ontological priority granted the primary qualities to be gratuitous and unwarranted. Berkeley concluded that the world must be nothing but ideas. Hume’s skepticism (1758) did not go quite as far as Berkeleyan idealism but contented itself to both emphasize the modern problem and exult in it, the problem of the extra-mental world or solipsism (Deely 2001: 564); “common sense”, he thought, reveals that we know only our ideas and have no way of linking our perceptions to things outside our minds. Kant (1781), finally, synthesizing the two currents of modern thought, insisted that the external world must exist, because something acts on our senses, but beyond this we cannot say anything about it, because all objects of knowledge—even our perceptions—depend on and result from the formative action of our minds upon the raw sense data according to the categories and principles of “universal” reason. Modern philosophy thus culminated in idealism, albeit a transcendental idealism, which denies access to the “things in themselves” and puts in their place mere “appearances” or “ideas”. This idealism followed from the basic assumption of Descartes—the one that defines modern thought as the Way of Ideas—that the thinking thing comes in contact only with ideas (albeit, purported ideas of the world). Deely concludes (2001: 571): [This] is what becomes of truth, at least the truth of philosophical modernity: acceptance of the proposition that, at the level of understanding, whatever the mind knows in what the mind knows of it the mind itself makes. 11

Modern philosophy, in short, was from start to finish a “nominalism” (ibid: xxxi), an unwitting experiment on the reduction of the conditions of knowledge to the “relation[s] of reason”, making the known world dependent on the mind alone for its existence. Incongruously, it failed to provide a philosophical foundation for the science of its day, which, by contrast, continued to succeed in its realm by leaps and bounds. This construal of modern philosophy throws it into sharp relief, accentuating its linear development, from thinker to thinker, of the consequences of its basic, Cartesian assumption. It also casts new light, Deely argues, on the philosophy of those “wouldbe”, “literary” postmodernists whose “pretensions”, he claims, “can be reduced to a single statement in the writings of their principal high-priest [Derrida]: ‘the signified concept is never present in and of itself, in a sufficient presence that would refer only to itself’” (2001: 611). These “would-bes” comprise that “mostly French” movement insistent that their “postmodernism has done away with linear time and linear argument, and shows at the heart of every text a void”. Their project turns out, upon close inspection, to yet further develop the “nominalistic” basis of modern philosophy. Drawing on the “semiology” of Ferdinand de Saussure (1906-11),10 this alleged “postmodernism” failed to live up to the name it took for itself, exulting in rather than surpassing the moderns’ “common sense” view that ideas comprise the whole category of objects of knowledge, that the object always stands in place of (rather than in relation to) its referent. The “would-be” postmodernists recognized the failure of modern 10

And incorporating along with other influences the “language games” of the later Wittgenstein For example (and as we shall see below), Lyotard (1979) bases his “Report on Knowledge” on the Wittgensteinian construal of meaning and truth and concludes that there appears an “incommensurability” between a multiplicity of knowledge-games produced in societies subject to “the postmodern condition”.

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metaphysics, but instead of seeking an improvement over it rather took it for the “last stand” of speculative philosophy.11 Thus they abandoned speculative philosophy in favor of the exploitation of the free play of “signs” in an a-historical, semiological guise. Particularly in trying to comprehend the notion of sign, this “postmodernism” displays a markedly modern character. It ignores philosophy between Aristotle and Descartes. It assumes that signs are ideal structures and that “signified”/“signifier” bonds are arbitrary in a gratuitous sense. Given the disastrous consequences for any ensuing semiological theory of communication or perception, we must look elsewhere, Deely tells us (2001: 669ff.), for a postmodernism rightly so called, and see the Saussureans for the “late moderns” they were. A viable postmodernism, by contrast, one worthy of the name, would recognize the limitations of modern philosophy but would as a result attempt to surpass it. Recognizing the Way of Ideas for the speculative dead end it was, it would perhaps return to the point in the history of philosophy from which the moderns took their illfated turn, intent on taking a different course. And having done so, it would find there that the main road leading up to that point consisted of a Way of Signs, a course abandoned by the moderns through ignorance rather than rejected through critique, a broad way whose direction, by contrast to the detour down the Way of Ideas, led in a promising direction. It would return to this abandoned Way and forge ahead on its path. 11

Philosophy, that is, which (Deely 2001: 81) …has for its object things which are what they are independently of human thought and action (or which will be what they will be when all human intervention is removed). Practical knowledge, or “practical thought”, in sharp contrast, has for its object precisely those things which would not be except for human thought or action, things precisely as under our control.

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The “Way of Signs” There is such a postmodernism, Deely claims. Embodied seminally in the work of Charles Sanders Peirce, who “violated the cardinal commandment of modernity: Thou shalt not learn from the Latins” and rediscovered the Way of Signs (Deely 2001: 613), this postmodernism recommenced on the Way of Signs under the name “semiotic”.12 The objects of study of semiotics, signs, differ drastically from the ideas posited by the moderns; for while the former consist of “pure ontological relations”, the latter consist not of relations to their referents but replacements for them, whose definitive intelligibility nonetheless leaves them impotent to deal with such basic experiences as communication and perception. Signs as understood by semiotics succeed in clarifying what the so-called signs of semiology only managed to obfuscate: communication, perception, and apprehension in general. For although the late moderns realized the indispensability of a notion of sign for understanding communication, their essentially modern, idealistic assumptions never allowed them to move past the belief that the sign is simply an “arbitrary” connection between two ideal elements, an “acoustic image” and a “concept”, or “signifiant” and a “signifié” (Saussure 1906-11: 65ff.), the one standing for the other. They later applied this belief to apprehension generally, with unfortunate results. It underlies, for example, Derrida’s categorical denial of presence. Sense perception thus escaped the grasp of the “would-be” postmodernists for the same reasons it escaped Descartes and all the other moderns. But Peircean semiotics renders perception and communication comprehensible and presents them as two sides of one 12

Now “semiotics”, as noted above (note 6).

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coin, or in a sense each other’s reversal. For objectification, the process of apprehending something or coming to know it, and communication, the transmission of meaning, both happen according to—or rather, name modes of—the distinctive type of relating called by Peirce “semiosis”, the action of signs. Derrida’s (1972) play of “différance” consists in the perpetual “deferring” of signifier to a signified which immediately becomes a signifier of some other, and so on, in an interminable, groundless succession of freely drifting, dyadic relations. By contrast, in semiosis, the action of signs, something, called by Peirce (c. 1897) the “representamen” (or “sign-vehicle”), comes to stand, “in some respect [as to a “ground”] or capacity”, for something else, its “object”, in such a way as to involve something else besides, called the “interpretant”.13 In other words, a sign comprises a triadic relation wherein a “First” stands in a relation to a “Second” in such a way as to involve—or on the basis of—some “Third”. The third element is a mediative one. In sensation, for example (Deely 2001: 695), a knower objectifies a thing through his or her or its senses thus: the thing (a representamen or First) comes to represent itself (a Second in this relation to the knower) in some respect (partially, and as to his senses as a ground), becoming an object in the umwelt of the knower (an interpretant or Third), the thing known in part. Within this relation, the thing sensed remains that element of the experience which evades reduction to the experience of it (Deely 1994: ¶44). It presents itself, if indirectly. In higher levels of cognitive activity, as for a second example in “the cases where the interpretant is a mental representation” (ibid: ¶69), an object of

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See Deely’s discussion of “Hermetic Drift” (1994: ¶84ff.).

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perception (a representation such as smoke perceived) stands for another object (a Second, such as the thought of fire) through a triadic relation with some concept as a ground (such as the notion that “where there’s smoke, there’s fire”). Critically, in human cognition, the umwelt becomes lebenswelt through the mediation of language, which transforms the perceptual world through the power of “stipulation” (ibid: ¶125, 134). A few aspects of semiosis reveal the import of semiotics for speculative philosophy. 14 First: semiosis, the active, triadic relation, operates according to a particular kind of causality called “specificative causality” or, more exactly, “extrinsic formal causality of the specifying type”. 15 The sign specifies something in particular and directs a knower’s intention to this specific object rather than just anything by relating the knower and the object in such a way as to cause knowledge thereof. Said differently: semiotic (as opposed to semiological) signs have rationales, the “Third” elements needed for any significant relationship. Second: signs are “ontological” relations and thus occupy reality in the sense that they retain an “indifference” to existing “minddependently” or “mind-independently” (2001: 696). This means that signs, as relations, exist regardless of whether any knower apprehends them; they do not depend for their being on the knower’s subjectivity. When they exist independently of being known, they “consist...in a pure relation according to the way relation has being” (ibid: 432). Deely calls unknown relations “suprasubjective”.16 Conversely, when known, they become “transcendental” or “objective” relations, relations grounded in the cognition of the 14

See note 11. Deely distinguishes the causality proper to semiosis from several other distinct types (2001: 633n73). See also Deely 1994: ¶79-80. 16 In Deely’s cant, “subjective” means “having physical existence”, and “objective” means “existing as known” (1994: ¶9; 2001: 6-7). It is a decided departure from the usual subject/object dichotomy. 15

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knower, over and above being suprasubjective relations as well. In short, these relations, as picked out in a semiotic ontology,17 may be objectified, but need not be, and they stand as real relations regardless of whether knowers ever take them up as such. Third: semiotics recognizes a distinction between things and objects as they function within semiosis, one important in distinguishing representational from sensual cognition and also for basic ontology: “For just as objects are what things become in experience, so signs are what objects become; but while objects as such do not in every case presuppose things, objects and things alike do presuppose signs within experience” (Deely 1994: ¶33); and further, “The paradox is that in order to be a known thing, the thing must be an object, whereas precisely as object it need not be a thing” (ibid: ¶40). “Paradox” aside, semiotics retains a technical distinction between the objects of knowledge and the things and relationships objectified, preserving the independent being of them from the mind of the knower. Finally: while sensation partially reveals aspects of things and relations as they exist mind-independently, perception always grounds its formation of objects in relation to the umwelt18 of the knowing subject, meaning often that much of—if not sometimes all of—the object of the knowing sign relation may be mind-dependent in the sense of having originated in a mind or minds (perhaps as a reflection of the needs or wants of the organism or organisms) and being sustained through culture. Minds create, for example, institutions, and though cultural artifacts such as names, printed references,

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Following Peirce, Deely (1994: ¶42-3; 2001: 310) calls “prescission” or “prescinding” the process enabling the philosopher to focus on, logically objectify, or technically abstract what does not in actuality appear by itself (such as relations which always require related elements). 18 See Deely (2001a).

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and the buildings that house them signify them, institutions have their proper being not in any of those things. In this way, Deely proffers semiotics as the postmodern philosophy that restores to the knower a connection to what exists apart from his knowledge. It is postmodern both because it avoids the problems of an idealist, modern stance and because it improves on it. We might say that walking the Way of Signs allows to one take up a position called a semiotic realism or semi-realism, a study of sign relations, or any philosophical enterprise based on the assumption thereof. It is a position which improves dramatically over the nominalism of modern philosophy. Thus Deely declares (2001: 691-2): By postmodernism, or postmodernity, I do not mean that collection of quintessentially idealist writings which revel in deconstruction...I mean quite simply the development of the consequences for human thought of the demonstration that ideas as signs do not and cannot consist in being the direct objects of experience and apprehension, as the moderns assumed. Ideas serve merely to found relations to objects signified which, as such, are indifferent to physical existence without precluding such existence on any general or a-priori grounds. According to semiotic postmodernism, then, we knowers live a world (lebenswelt) of objects comprised of aspects partly mind-dependent and partly mind-independent, partly physical and partly cultural, and which may be comprised of or signified by physical or mental “sign-vehicles”. We neither apprehend a world of pure material or of pure idea, but a world, as Peirce says (1905-6: CP 5.448n), “perfused with signs”—yet at the same time a knowable world, one that does present itself through them, the world conceived from a properly postmodern perspective.

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The salient difference between modernism’s “idea” and the Peircean sign is this: The idea stands in place of its object. It makes significance ideal. The sign, by contrast, stands for its object, relating the knower to it. Semiotics accounts for the reality of significance. The Basics of Semiotics Let us make no mistake. What Deely offers is not a comprehensive history of philosophy—not that he purports to. What he presents the reader, unequivocally, is an argument for a doctrine, the “doctrine of signs” or semiotics. The argument is contrastive, juxtaposing the Peircean sign with the modern “idea”. Deely’s account is not as much a story of what has been done, or is being done, in philosophy, as it is a story of what, having just begun, should be done in the future. Four Ages of Understanding, one might say, alluding to Kant, is a prolegomena to any future philosophy, or a groundwork to a metaphysic of meaning, couched in a narrative format. On this prologue, “modernity” constitutes a philosophical “detour”, but Charles Sanders Peirce, as the “first of the postmoderns” (2001: 614), has at least rediscovered the main route of the history of philosophy. In the last lines of his book, Deely “leave[s] the reader” with a “clear and central task” for establishing this nascent postmodernism: she must take to “exploring the path” newly rediscovered (ibid: 742). Along these lines, I have described semiotics, the Way of Signs, as it contrasts with modernity, the Way of Ideas and its alleged “postmodern” development. But to ensure clarity, I want to delineate the “basics of semiotics”, as it were: the central

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elements of the semiotics, the doctrine that Deely proffers as the foundation of philosophical postmodernism, the signs of the path he leaves us to explore. I allude to Deely’s book by the same name (1990), but I hope to say concisely what Deely says within a wealth of detail throughout his oeuvre. Semiotics, broadly construed, is a theory of relations. Its central assertion is that all relations are triadic, for even the simplest relationship consists of three elements: two things and a relation (a “First”, “Second”, and “Third”). Peirce calls such brute relations “degenerate”.19 Semiotics, narrowly construed, is the theory of significance construed in terms of “genuine” triadic relations, wherein the relationship between Firsts and Seconds is such that the First “stands for” the Second “in some respect or capacity”, that is, in relation to a Third (Deely 1994: ¶65). To put it differently: semiotics, narrowly construed, is the theory of signs or sign relations, by which something comes to stand for another on the basis of or grounded by some mediating element. These triadic relations are irreducible to combinations of monadic or dyadic relations, but all n-adic relations where n >3 are such that they reduce to triads. Significance, thus, does not reduce to the brute dyadic relations of a modern realism or the monadic relations of a modern idealism. It depends on the irreducible “Thirdness” of sign-relations, as Peirce calls it (1903: CP 1.23-6). Semiotics does not posit a unitary or ultimate ground of significance, but allows for multiple and pertinent

19

Pape (1990: 378) provides a concise explanation of what we can call the “principle of degeneracy”: that “the genuine triadic relation becomes more concrete with every additional step of degeneration”.

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sources of normativity. Insofar as semiotics intertwines with “pragmatism”,20 normativity is embodied in the aims and purposes of the knower, an embodied, historicized, communitarian subject. It also owes to the structure of the objects of signification. The theory of normativity, however, remains unfinished. What follows as a corollary of semiotics’ central assertion is the insistence on the reality of relations. Relationships are not things, but they can and do exist in the physical world. Semiotics calls them “ontological” or “real”, in the sense that they are “indifferent” to existing physically (“suprasubjectively”) in the world or existing transcendentally (“objectively”) in the umwelt.21 Organisms intervene in the world, producing new relations. Human beings, in doing so, often introduce novel kinds of relationships (or systems of relationships) which are nonetheless physically real (governments, for example). Semiotics is a representationalism insofar as it understands the umwelt to be the world as “modeled” by an organism (Deely 2001a). Roughly, knowledge is constituted through the modeling of relationships between objects within the “lifeworld” of an organism. Knowing is a semiotic process insofar as the object known can be said to stand in relation to the knower, in such a way that it terminates the knowing relation. Either things or relationships can become “objects” in the sense of being objectified. Importantly, mental representations can sometimes terminate knowing relations (such that the representation is the object), but also sometimes merely serve as the mediating element in a knowing relation with a thing or relationship outside the mind (such that the 20 21

Later, “pragmaticism” (Peirce 1905). Recall the relevant usage of “subjective” and “objective”, as noted above (note 16).

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extra-mental thing or relation is the object). This is what happens in perception, wherein ideas combine with sensation to produce its objects. Framing knowledge makes use of the terms “subject” and “object”, but there is no dualism of subject and object in semiotics. Semiotics adheres to a kind of monism— perhaps even a “physicalism” of a sort, working from Deely’s use of “physical”. On semiotic monism/realism, things and relationships are physical or real, and knowing subjects are physical things. Their umwelts are representations of their environments constituted in terms of situational significance. Language, according to semiotics, is the human, species-specific “primary modeling system” which transforms umwelt into “lebenswelt” (Deely 2000; 2001a). “What distinguishes human understanding” from that of other organisms—and what distinguishes our representational capacities from other organisms’—is the ability to make explicit use of signs by combining them into arguments (Deely 2000; Haworth and Prewitt 2006). Communication, as an example of this use, is accordingly a secondary use of language (Sebeok 1991). Abstract thought is another example (Haworth and Prewitt 2006). Thus, semiotics is a theory of significance and therefore a theory of meaning. Semiotics is also a theory of properties. Relationships are considered real, and thus sets of relationships (“universals”) are also real, insofar as some higher-order, mediating relation connects the members of a set. Helmut Pape (1990: 381) says it concisely, taking Peirce for the spokesperson of semiotics: Peirce was not a Platonic realist, that is to say, he did not believe in the existence of individual universals. The universals are real, but they don’t 22

exist. For Peirce, the relation of instantiation between a universal and its manifestation is a triadic relation. Finally, when the reality of relations is construed as the reality of mediation, semiotics accounts for intersubjectivity (in the sense of mutual understanding) by recognizing the reality of not only the representamen and its object, but also the mediating element(s) between them. Mediation may sometimes not have been found (as in incommensurability), but in such cases the problem is not, in principle, one of access, as I argue in Chapter 3.22

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The discussion I omit, which the reader might here expect, regards applied semiotics, which makes use of the semiotic theory of relations to pursue an understanding of a variety of phenomena by construing them as sign-systems and elaborating on them as such. Describing the vast array of applications of semiotic method to disciplines outside philosophy would constitute a digression. So I shall just mention in passing that both there is some controversy over the extent of semiotics’ domain (see, e.g., Houser 2006), and that semiotics is being posed nonetheless, by semioticians, as the ultimate interdisciplinary field of study. The variety of disciplines represented at the annual meetings of the Semiotic Society of America attests to this.

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CHAPTER II THE FRONTIER BETWEEN MODERN PHILOSOPHY AND POSTMODERN TIMES Deely’s (2001) account of modern and postmodern philosophy demands further exposition, especially on his critical distinction between semiotics and semiology in the discussion of postmodernism. Deely’s claim (ibid: 669ff.) is that semiology is the distinctively modern account of the sign that is accepted by the “would-be” postmodernists. By contrast, genuine postmodernism is Peircean semiotics (ibid: 613-4). Both points are so far underdeveloped. In this chapter, I hope to show the modern, idealist tendencies of Saussure’s semiology. Peircean semiotics offers an account of signification superior to it. However, the semiotic doctrine of signs also has important limitations—not as a theory of significance, but insofar as Deely (ibid) takes it for the total doctrine of postmodernism. Signification in Saussure’s “Semiology”23 Putatively distinct according to the contemporary division of sign theory, Saussurean semiology and Peircean semiotics differ particularly in the scope of their theories (Deely 2006). Saussure’s interest is the foundation of linguistics as the science

23

Parts of this section are drawn more or less directly from Smith 2006.

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of language, while Peirce pursues the science of signs as the foundation for all realms of intellectual inquiry.

Figure 1: The Saussurean Analysis of Discourse Saussure’s (1906-11: 11) theory of language includes an illustration of two men, marked “A” and “B”, speaking to each other. Their speech is represented by a series of dashed lines that sag between them like a burdened rope bridge. The dashed lines form a circuit that runs from A’s brain to A’s mouth, out of A’s mouth to B’s ear, from B’s ear to B’s brain, from B’s brain to B’s mouth, then out of B’s mouth to A’s ear, and finally from A’s ear back to A’s brain. Saussure says that each brain “associates” (ibid: 12) mental facts or concepts with mental representations of the linguistic sounds or soundimages that express them. The brain transmits an impulse to the vocal organs, which transduce the signal. Each man’s ears register the audible signal; assuming each is part of the same linguistic community, their brains recognize the sound-image latent in the 25

sounds, and through mirroring processes of association, produce the corresponding concept. In short, concepts and sound-images are associated in minds according to the pattern determined by a common language; phonation vocalizes a sound-image that upon audition produces the associated concept. The sound-image/concept pair is the formal reality of the linguistic sign as the unity of “signifier” and “signified”. This analysis yields a sophisticated theory of discourse, as illustrated as on Figure 1 (ibid).

Figure 2: “Sound-Image” and “Concept” Chains, after Saussure (1906-11) On Saussure’s picture of discourse, someone says something about something to someone. There is an object of discourse, something signified by speech. But the only way to relate the linguistic sign to any object, within the Saussurean framework, is to draw on the notion of “association”. Unfortunately, Saussure leaves “association” undefined. He also does not ask how the concept side of the linguistic unit refers to nonconceptual objects. As far as Saussure is concerned, meaning is completely internal to both language and mind. This becomes clear when we examine the way in which linguistic units can be

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Figure 3: Distinction of Signs by Mutual Opposition, after Saussure (1906-11) discerned. The raw chain of phonetic “sound-images”, marked “A” on Figure 2 (Saussure 1906-11: 104), breaks up according to the distinction of “concepts”, marked “B”; yet neither can be meaningfully considered independently from each other. There may be overlap on either chain, and each language articulates concepts differently and arbitrarily. The distinction of signs depends on their “mutual opposition” to each other as part of a static network of differences, as shown on Figure 3 (ibid: 115). Most importantly, however, both aspects of the sign, the sound-image and the concept it signifies are, in Saussure’s cant, “psychological” entities (ibid: 12). On this picture, the mind is privy to the arbitrary pattern linking formal structures on the signifying side with formal structures on the signified side. Speech, somehow, is parsed into sound-images, and then directs the hearer’s intention to the concepts associated with them. But how the formal/ideal structure of language relates to the world, Saussure does not say. Speech must, somehow, be taken to stand for the world, but if Saussure’s notion of sign allows for that kind of signification, he does not say so. Precisely for this reason—for his making use of a theory of signs grounded in mental or psychological association—Deely accuses the Saussurean of “veering...toward solipsism” (1994: ¶184). The problem is that if language is comprised entirely of

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“images” and “concepts”, then attempting to explain how it says anything about the world results in an impasse. Solipsism, the most extreme case of the problem of interaction between ideas and physical things, presents itself as a distinct possibility when one holds that all meaning depends on ideas as a medium between words and world. This kind of “dog-legged” attempt at understanding meaning, such as Saussure’s semiology represents, has been at least problematized if not discredited (Blackburn 1982: 39ff.). The distinction between Saussure and Peirce’s sign theories becomes evident with the recognition of the broader scope of Peirce’s theory: its account of the formal structure of significance. The ontology of Peircean semiotics surpasses Saussure’s limited and eminently modern24 perspective, justifying Deely’s claim (2001: 675) that “what was at stake in the contest between semiology and semiotics” was “the frontier between modern philosophy and postmodern times”. Semiotics recognizes the reality of relationships of standing-for. It is, as Lucia Santaella (2003: 45) notes, “a complex and multifaceted theory of representation”. “There is no crisis of representation according to Peirce” because the Peircean sign’s primary function is mediative: representation is only one aspect of its mediative function; the other is determination. The object determines the sign, and through the sign determines the interpretant. The sign (not [solely] a concept or idea) represents the object (also not solely concept or idea). Further, because signs are “indifferent” to existing “in the world” or “in the mind” (Deely 2001: 434-5), signifying relations may be abstracted from their physical reality and modeled in the

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“Ultramodern”, says Deely (2001: 685).

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mind through language (as discussed in Chapter 1). On Peircean semiotics, the ability for argument appears on its reverse as the ability to understand. Thus Saussure’s schema fits neatly in a dualistic metaphysic typical of modern, as opposed to postmodern, philosophy—one which locates meaning and understanding within the multitude of representations circumscribed entirely within the mind and associated by and according to its faculties. The Peircean sign theory, by contrast, proffers an ontology which avoids the problem of interaction and the crisis of representation. Because the Peircean semiotics accounts for representation as a reality—an ontological fact—it offers a superior theory of significance. Because of the ambiguity of the ontological status of signs on Saussurean semiology, even the supposed stability provided by the linguistic community is thrown into doubt. When meaning and understanding are thought to be grounded in the relation of (mental) sound-images with (mental) concepts, and when the concept is taken for the object signified and the object present to self, the relationship between concept and world remains ambiguous and dubitable: There may be no other; just a mere image in the mind. Even on a cautious and optimistic reading, if Saussure’s schema does not lead to solipsism, it leaves open the possibility and gives no answer to the skeptic. It also leads to other problems, to be discussed in Chapter 3. By contrast, Peirce’s semiotics, based in a sophisticated ontology, explains how (and that) signs relate to their objects. Peircean representation allows for no crisis—no question of solipsism—because every sign always includes a mediating element. As a part of reality (rather than an idea set over against it), the sign

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really points out something real. And that sign exists in an intersubjective world owing to more than linguistic practice. Yet even if semiotics wins out over semiology in comprehending the sign—even if semiology has modernist leanings that semiotics avoids—and even if Deely (2001: 675) is right that the difference between them marks the “frontier” between modernity and postmodernity defined in terms of the history of the sign—the doctrine of signs must still be evaluated on its own terms. Deely defends his account of postmodernism as semiotics on a twofold argument: the continuist history of the doctrine of signs, and the contrastive account with the modernist treatment of representation. But how does semiotics hold up on its own right? Should postmodernism be just semiotics? Is semiotics comprehensive enough to define postmodernism as a whole? Postmodernism as Semiotics? The problem with deciding to tell history in terms of doctrine—and in our case, the problem with deciding to tell the history of philosophy in terms of doctrine—is that you lose all the emotive force of narrative to the sheer tentativity of the doctrine whose story you decide to tell. This is where—to employ again the terms of which I made use in the Introduction—the “critical” philosopher of history loses out to the historicist. All he can do is present the doctrine, for better or worse, and wait to see how things turn out. That history has led to his doctrine faces him as sort of a brute fact, doing nothing to affirm his doctrine, since it has led to all other doctrines as well. His particular version of that history is only as good as the doctrine that guides its telling. Will it be vindicated?

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John Deely (2001), self-avowedly “critical” in this sense of approaching philosophy doctrinally rather than in the less tractable terms we set aside earlier,25 must surely find himself in such a situation. There is a story of semiotics, indeed, but so too is there a story behind each and every one of the doctrines being promulgated in philosophical circles across the globe. What his semiotics has going for it, however, is the decided continuity marking its development “from ancient Greece to the turn of the twenty-first century”. If, a critic might object, the continuity is only apparent, for semiotics constitutes only a return to medieval thought abandoned for good reasons, Deely might still have that critic beat. For his account of the consequences, during modernity, of abandoning the sign in favor of the idea compels, to say the least. And semiotics may very well succeed in its ontology, to name just one of its endeavors. Yet, even if, as Deely (2001) argues, semiotics aligns better (at least, more explicitly) with the extended history of philosophy than do other contemporary schools of philosophy, that alone tells us nothing about the efficacy of its doctrine. Nor does it tell us, prima facie, anything about the efficacy of their doctrines. For Deely, however, it seems to be enough. I have in mind his treatment of “analytic” and “continental” philosophy, which comprise, respectively, the decided mainstream of philosophy in the English-speaking world and its embattled minority. Deely dismisses the entire mainstream in one fell swoop, on the basis of its genealogy—but not, unfortunately, on the basis of a consideration of any of its current

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As “episteme, Weltanschauung, zeitgeist”, etc. above (p. 2-3).

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doctrines. 26 Deely’s treatment of analytic philosophy, its proponents “steeped in the preoccupations and epistemological presuppositions of modernity” (2001: 725), is contained in a few paragraphs under the heading, “Twilight on the Way of Ideas”. He says of analytic philosophy generally (ibid: 581): Even today, you will find the successors to British empiricism, which transformed itself into “analytic philosophy” when it restricted its “data of sense” to logical formulae and linguistic expressions (and primarily current English ones at that), proudly and massively ignorant both of previous philosophy in general and of the Latin Age in particular. When the analytic philosophers did study history, a great deal of damage frequently resulted, for they used their own fresh-minted view of philosophy as a Procrustean bed upon which to examine earlier philosophical works as verifications or anticipation of the latest fads of their own usage. Continental philosophy, whose line traces through Husserl, receives a similar treatment. It reduces to a “successor of rationalism” (ibid). In Wittgenstein’s thought, Deely sees a transition from rationalism (in the “early” Wittgenstein) to empiricism (in the “later”). Wittgenstein stands metonymically, then, for all of mainstream, analytic and continental, philosophy. Deely proclaims of Wittgenstein (ibid: 582-3): When the new book [Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 1953)] finally did appear, shortly after Wittgenstein’s death, it set the movement of “analytic philosophy” on its heels and split off a following devoted to “ordinary language philosophy” wherein, as you might imagine, the whole of philosophy traditionally conceived is turned from a logistician’s27 nightmare into a nominalist’s heaven. This split [of neorationalism and neo-empiricism] within the analytic movement endured for the remainder of the twentieth century.

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I need not remind the reader that Deely claims a doctrinal approach to philosophy. “Logistician”: “a person skilled in symbolic logic” (Deely 2001: 583).

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He concludes (ibid: 584): “In Wittgenstein, the solipsism and nominalism of modernity found their fullest incarnation, first the one, and then the other”. I leave the defense of Wittgenstein to others, but I cite Deely’s treatment of Wittgenstein because of his standing for contemporary philosophy as metonym. The inference to be drawn from Deely’s treatment of him—since Deely nowhere discusses mainstream philosophy in any further detail—is that the mainstream of today’s philosophy in the English-speaking world is to be dismissed because of its intellectual genealogy and its a-historical tendencies. I fear that Vincent Colapietro (2006: 6) is right in saying of Deely’s Four Ages of Understanding: For all of its erudition and, I would unhesitatingly add, for all of its wisdom, the book under consideration here is marred by the tendency of its author to draw his distinctions too sharply, too absolutely. If Deely would pursue philosophy as doctrine, then let him treat the mainstream in the same way. I plead for a doctrinal treatment of mainstream, contemporary philosophy not only for fairness’ sake, but also because Deely’s project is not so different from much of the work being done therein. This is true despite his claims regarding the legitimate genealogy of his project, and the illegitimacy of theirs. Recognizing Deely’s doctrine of signs for a logic and/or an ontology of relations applied to a representationalist theory of cognition and a physicalist account of mind means admitting that Deely’s semiotics is not utterly different from the work being done, by analytic philosophers, in logic, ontology, cognition, and the philosophy of mind—even if semiotics offers a complex and multifaceted theory of representation that improves on modern presuppositions still

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haunting contemporary philosophy.28 That is to say, semiotics, though couched in a better historical awareness and terminology, does not differ greatly from certain theories proffered in analytic philosophy. Nor does it differ entirely from parts of the continental tradition, either, as will be suggested in Chapter 3. I will not make a detailed survey of contemporary work being done outside semiotics that compares with that being done within it, but I will point to a few examples that suffice to make my point. Daniel Dennett (1991) raises a substantial critique of modern philosophy’s idealist theory of consciousness, which he calls the “Cartesian Theater”, highlighting many of the same shortcomings that Deely emphasizes. Simon Blackburn (1982) similarly recognizes the inefficacy of the “idea” in accounting for linguistic meaning. Kim Sterelny (2003) advances an evolutionary account of “decoupled representation” that is not much different from Deely’s Sebeokian theory centered on the umwelt / lebenswelt, and which pursues a similar line of thought as work done by other semioticians (e.g., Haworth 2006; Haworth and Prewitt 2006). Insofar as semiotics emphasizes intersubjectivity over against radical incommensurability (as I argue in Chapter 3), it finds an ally in Donald Davidson (1974), who seeks to dismantle “the very idea of a conceptual scheme”. Analytic philosophy has even returned explicitly to metaphysics, evidence of its recognition of positivism’s failure (e.g., Kripke 1980). Finally, while semiotics constitutes a logic qua theory of relations, it goes without saying that in mainstream philosophy, much work is being done in the philosophy of logic and philosophy of properties—and much of this is indispensable, despite its “rationalist”,

28

As expressed in, for example, Rorty (1979).

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modern origins. All of this work, and much besides, coheres with and supplements the doctrine of signs as it has been formulated so far, despite its not accepting the name or the lineage of semiotics as the historical Way of philosophy. Even on the recognition both that semiotics was the mainstream of philosophy until modernity and that modernity was a detour down a dead end, the diversity of contemporary philosophy that recognizes modernity’s limitations and surpasses its doctrine belies an exclusivist definition of postmodernism as semiotics and semiotics alone. The exclusivist picture of postmodernism fails for its lack of appreciation for the scope and breadth of mainstream philosophy. Because of its coherence with diverse schools of contemporary philosophy—and their complementarity with it—semiotics may be the postmodern path, but not all those walking it will call it by that name. An understanding of postmodernism as semiotics must accommodate the diversity of banners under which postmodernism will develop. Nonetheless, Deely’s account of modernity and fledgling postmodernity succeeds in showing the legitimacy of postmodernism as the doctrine for an era of philosophy that really moves beyond modernism. It succeeds because it lays bare the foundation of modernism: dualism which gives way to idealism, a troubled theory of mental representation that implies solipsism, and a logic of ideal categories that produces an insoluble epistemic quagmire. And it succeeds in showing that postmodernism rightly considered, thus, must have two aspects: First, it must recognize the limitations of modern philosophy. Second, it must surpass it. Semiotics, as Deely tells its story, succeeds on both counts.

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CHAPTER III PUTATIVE POSTMODERNISM I hope to have accomplished, by now, at least three things: a sketch of postmodernism as semiotics; a contrastive account of semiology; and a critique of both. What remains is to discuss putative postmodernism. In this chapter, I modify the question with which I began, to ask: What is putative postmodernism, in terms of the theory of significance? In the Introduction, I related something like the “two thesis” portrayal of putative postmodernism. On this typical picture, postmodernism consists in two theses: a “negative” thesis announcing the demise of modernism and a “positive” thesis describing the role of philosophy thereafter. Postmodernism needs to be put this way because it is not merely relativism.29 We have seen that Deely’s semiotic postmodernism

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Baggini and Stangroom (2002: 36) make this point nicely, though they proclaim that postmodernism has itself come to and “end”. They mean, of course, what I call “putative” postmodernism. Philosophically speaking, postmodernism can be understood in terms of its negative and positive thesis. Negatively, postmodernism rejects the idea of the “grand narrative”, the all-embracing philosophical system which can explain the whole of human experience and history. The problem is that many people can agree with that [who are not postmodernists]…What distinguishes postmodernism cannot thus be its negative thesis. Nor can it simply be equated with a rejection of the possibility of absolute truth: there are many relativists in philosophy and few would characterise themselves as postmodernists. Postmodernism as a philosophical position is something at once more specific and more vague. It is characterised not just by a rejection of the idea of objective truth, but a celebration of that rejection combined with an ironic, playful detachment from any issue or debate which seems to take the idea of truth too seriously for its liking.

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(2001) accepts the negative thesis, but revises the positive one. He further claims that modernism and putative postmodernism belie both our experience by reducing it to solipsism and our world by reducing it to our ideas. Insofar as philosophy’s purpose— and here I make a sweeping and vague generalization—is to help us understand our experience, our world, and ourselves, Deely insists that putative postmodernism falls short. However, Deely does not do much more than imply how this claim applies to the putative postmodernists—his “would-be” postmodernists—besides Derrida. As it applies to Jean-François Lyotard and Michel Foucault, for example, the critique is not even begun. One way to begin such a critique is to examine a corollary of that twofold infidelity: the failure of modernism and putative postmodernism to account for intersubjectivity. In addition to its complicity with solipsism and nominalism, a third collusion of putative postmodernism is its positing of radical incommensurability. Indeed, putative postmodernism’s acceptance of the doctrine of radical incommensurability defines it, insofar as it asserts that incommensurability disrupts significance at every turn. However, it should be noted that putative postmodernism bears a strange kinship with modernity that is not quite the kinship that Deely thinks it is. One could reasonably hold that Michel Foucault, for example, is closer to modernism than any kind of postmodernism because for Foucault, like Schönfeld (2003) mentioned in the Introduction, modernity begins with Kant—but Foucault goes farther still: postmodernism should be rejected outright. Foucault (1982: 248) calls postmodernism “a

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widespread and facile tendency…to designate that which has just occurred as the primary enemy, as if this were always the principal form of oppression from which one had to liberate oneself”. Foucault’s modernism culminates in his late adoption of Kant’s answer to the question, “What is Enlightenment?” “[M]odern philosophy”, Foucault claims, “is the philosophy that is attempting to answer the question raised so imprudently two centuries ago: Was ist Aufklärung?” (1984: 32). Foucault takes exactly the opposite approach from mine; he denies the relevance of doctrine. Our link to Enlightenment/modernity, he says, is to be established not through “faithfulness to doctrinal elements” but instead through “the permanent reactivation of an attitude—that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era” (ibid: 42). Thus, despite his early prediction (1966: 387) of the end of both man (the “invention” of modernity) and the modernity that sustains him, Foucault situates his subsequent work in a persistent modernity, “our” situation (1984: 42). Notice, for example, his concern with “modern” power in Discipline and Punish (1975: 223). It is telling that Foucault, a thinker listed under the postmodernist rubric, vehemently rejects the possibility of escaping modernity. What it tells is that we should be careful here. It should give us pause, for how seriously should we take a movement of thought whose alleged proponents repudiate it? Whose doctrine is this “postmodernism”? Who invented it? Does anyone uphold it? These questions are especially poignant because Deely has not carefully considered them.

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Yet just as Foucault’s rejection of postmodernism prompts reconsideration of it, his contented allegiance to modernism also deserves reconsideration. His conception of “modernity” as an “ethos” devoid of “doctrinal elements” may not be usefully distinguished from the other eras of the history of philosophy. Surely, a “philosophical ethos” of self-reflexive critique must guide our thought, but has not that been the way of philosophy since its outset? Only Foucault’s caveat that this renewed critique must be “permanent” serves to differentiate his “modernity” from the past eras of thought. Yet it makes of modernity the end of philosophy, in both senses of being its final stage and its termination. I suspect that Foucault (1984: 42) is entirely right when he says that modernism demands “a permanent critique of [its] historical era”. He is right in claiming (from within modernity) its permanence, because modernism posits, above all else, its own finality. His claim should be reckoned with, being intuitively supported in part because the trivial definition of “modern” is “contemporary”. Foucault’s reasons for positing an inescapable modernity are less trivial, but, I argue, dubious: modernity’s “permanence” is an illusion derived from its presuppositions, and it can be surpassed. It seems strange, at first, that Foucault’s inescapable “modernity” coheres so well with Jean-François Lyotard’s notion of the “postmodern” (1979: xxiv), defined, “simplifying to the extreme”, as “incredulity toward metanarrative”. It is precisely the heroic (meta)narrative of “man” that Foucault (1966: 303ff.) sets out to destabilize. His “archaeology of the human sciences” undermines that strange “empirico-transcendental doublet” in whom modernity had hoped to ground the “order of things” (ibid). As a result, Foucault (1971) finds the modern philosopher left with no method besides

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“genealogy”. Modernism as the philosophy of modernity consists of the perpetual recognition of its own failure and the ongoing attempt to recover “origins” without holding out hope for an ursprung. The resemblance between Foucault and Lyotard is striking. Our “postmodern condition”, Lyotard (1979: 37) claims, results from the failure of the two “grand narratives” of modernity: that of the liberal hero of knowledge and that of the Hegelian dialectic of the Spirit. Threatened by the “performativity principle”, the “terror” of “technocracy”, postmodern knowledge must grow through “paralogy”, the search for instabilities that undermine operating theories (ibid: 41ff.). Lyotard thus makes full use of the “postmodern label”, but does not fully absolve himself of modernism. In a discussion (1982: 79) informed more by aesthetic than epistemological concerns, his answer to the question of “What…is postmodernism” is that “It is undoubtedly a part of the modern”. Foucault and Lyotard therefore share a critique of the modern attempt to ground knowledge in conceptions of the subject. Yet they both explicitly relate their projects to modernism. And, insofar as they denounce the foundationalist aspirations peculiar to modernism, they approach a kind of postmodernism. Further, they might be grouped together because each develops the notion of radical incommensurability. Yet what the notion of radical incommensurability means for the two of them differs greatly. When considered in terms of the theory of significance, they diverge entirely. It is my claim that only Foucault winds up foundering in the notion of radical incommensurability because of the influence on him of the distinctive, modern theory of significance. Foucault follows Ferdinand de Saussure’s version, semiology, explicitly (especially, in,

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e.g., Foucault 1966). He is rightly called a putative postmodernist, insofar as the notion is coherent. Lyotard’s postmodernism, though, is not easily undermined. Nor is it rightly excluded by the definition of postmodernism as semiotics, because it treats significance by drawing on pragmatics, a notion not yet discussed but close to heart of the Peircean theory of significance. Finally, Lyotard shares with Deely the critique of what we have called the modern theory of significance. Radical Incommensurability in Foucault 30 Let us begin with a characterization of incommensurability. We can approach the notion by recounting Foucault’s influential examination (1966: xxi) of “the pure experience of order and of its modes of being” in the eras of Western thought. He begins this examination by recalling the inspiration for it: “the laughter that shattered...all the familiar landmarks of [his] thought” when he encountered a certain “passage in Borges” (ibid: xv). This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ [sic] in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that. Foucault does not use the term “incommensurable”, but his hypotheses about the history of knowledge bear directly on the topic (Hacking 1979: 48). In The Order of Things, 30

Parts of this section are drawn from Smith 2006a.

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Foucault pursues the origin of “man” (the object of the human sciences), who is a “recent invention” (1966: 386) made possible by the “great upheaval that occurred in the Western episteme” (ibid: 367) that marked the advent of “modernity”. Foucauldian “incommensurability”—which I believe we can talk about despite his not naming it— distinguishes systems of order (epistemes) “that distribute the multiplicity of existing things into any of the categories that make it possible...to name, speak, and think” (ibid: xix). We face the “stark impossibility of thinking” (or naming or speaking) of “things” whenever they are constituted within an episteme different from our own. That is to say, the very objects of thinking, naming, and speaking—and, I suppose, doing—are (unconscious) creations of epistemes. And just as epistemes are incommensurable, so also are discourses produced within one episteme incommensurable with discourses produced in another; and this because—finally—their respective objects of reference are accordingly incommensurable. Incommensurability in the early Foucault (1966), then, means radical discontinuity: discontinuity between certain discourses, between their objects, and between the epistemes that make them possible. Foucault posits between epistemes an unbridgeable chasm—or rather a network of chasms, separating systems of possibility across historical time and geographical space, imposing on knowledge a decided parochialism and an indefatigable pluralism. On this view, incommensurability denies the possibility of mediation. It is a problem of access to meaning. However, at least one commentator has shown that the boundaries of Foucault’s epistemes have been crossed: J. G. Merquior, in his superior critical study of Foucault

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(1984), shows that the “portrait of epistemes as totally unconnected monoliths” overlooks a variety of “transepistemic” phenomena, such as “anachronisms” and “epistemic lags” (ibid: 62ff.). Merquior points, for example, to the steady progression of mathematics across the epistemes and a “dialectical return” of a “past form...of thought” with the positing of phlogiston. And I would point to the resurgence of ancient atomism in “classical” physics (e.g., Newton 1704). The upshot is (Merquior 1984: 62): Transepistemic problematics, epistemic lags and dialectical returns are all phenomena alien—indeed, refractory—both to strict caesuralism and to the view that epistemes are compact, homogenous conceptual infrastructures. But “transepistemic” phenomena aren’t the only source of trouble, because they are (ibid: 64): In the main...interepistemic issues...Further problems, on the other hand, fly more exclusively in the face of [Foucault’s] second dogma— epistemes as monoliths. They cast doubt on the accuracy of Foucault’s picture of intraepistemic realities. These problems include: first, that “taken synchronically, Foucault’s epistemes— contrary to their alleged massive unity—seem to encompass a lot of heterogeneity” (ibid: 62). Second, there are “breaks” and “ruptures” within epistemes and even within the thought of their exemplars (ibid: 70). None of this will surprise the philosopher who is cognizant of the history of the doctrine of signs and who has spent time in Foucault. Indeed, Foucault’s version of history is profoundly an anti-semiotics, despite his appeal to “semiotic” (or rather, semiological) terminology. This is true for two reasons. One is Foucault’s insistence on discontinuity in the history of thought. Whereas Foucault poses the aforementioned

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ruptures between epistemes, John Deely has shown that the development of “semiotic consciousness” (Deely 2004: 75) forms a progressive continuity throughout the history of philosophy, from “ancient” and “Latin” to “postmodern” “ages” (Deely 2001). Deely’s history of semiotics belies Foucault’s account because it shows a dramatic instance of “interepistemic” continuity: Peircean semiotics should not be possible in the “modern” episteme, but it nonetheless appears. Another reason—the more important one—for my saying that Foucault’s history is an “anti-semiotics” is that Foucault tells the history of the sign, in its varied conceptions, in such a way as to end up in a position that allows, in the first place, his adoption of the very notion of episteme-ic incommensurability characterized above. Let me clarify. Asserting radical incommensurability between epistemes, discourses, and the objects thereof depends on the belief that objects and discourses about them are constrained and determined in their production by fundamental structures that are discrete and unmediated—and indeed unmediable. This, I think, is Foucault’s assertion. And this assertion, I argue, depends on the identification of these fundamental structures (systems of order) with systems of signs understood on the Saussurean scheme.31 Foucault holds a position rather like what M. C. Dillon (1995; 1997: 181) calls “semiological reductionism”, the doctrine on which all phenomena reduce to signs of the Saussurean variety: binary, linguistic units comprised of signifier-signified pairs bonded, ambiguously, through “association”. “Association” is the key term in Saussurean

31

The claim that Saussurean sign-systems comprise the sole productive source of the objects of knowledge is not out of place in the milieu from which similar claims would come from Marxism, psychoanalysis, and—at least on the usual reading—deconstruction (Culler 1986: 134ff.).

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semiology and the most problematic, as noted in Chapter 2. Dillon has pointed out that either of two options, historical fact or transcendental psychology, is capable of carrying out the Saussurean process of association (1997: 181); both are equally compatible with Saussure’s semiology, but Saussure makes no commitment to either. Foucault commits himself to the former option: the process responsible for episteme-ic order is not transcendental mind (which is precisely the entity he wants to historicize), but the contingencies of historical fact: historical contingency rather than transcendental ego “associates” signifiers and signifieds and disperses the network of differences productive of them. He arrives at this position largely through an account of the historical understanding of the sign, in which he locates at least two radical “breaks” (1966: 50ff.). Though the breaks—dramatic “ruptures” in conception of the sign— correspond roughly with Deely’s own demarcations of the “Latin”, “modern”, and “postmodern” “ages”, Foucault’s account of change from one conception of the sign to another is subsumed under the general history of successive, discrete, and incommensurable systems of order. That one episteme would produce different modes of signifying from another he takes for granted. And the successive conceptions of the sign are—pardon the pun—symptomatic. Renaissance signs constitute a “prose of the world” (1966: 17), on which the whole world, as well as the written and spoken word, constitute a single text to be read, whose signifiers relate to their signifieds through “an intermediary figure” called “resemblance” or “similitude”. With the appearance of (what Foucault calls) “classicism”, however, the sign collapses from “ternary” to “binary” (ibid: 42), and similitude, Foucault claims, comes to be thought a dangerous source of

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error. For “classical” order comprises a “taxonomy” of “identity and difference” established through the identification of “discrete” units and their “measurement” (ibid: 50-8). “Modernity” retains the binary sign but attempts to ground its unity in the study of man, “a strange empirico-transcendental doublet” (ibid: 318ff.). Foucault of course denies the “doublet’s” efficacy as a ground of order precisely because it has a historical origin and because it may succumb to the vicissitudes of history. Saussure, having “rediscovered...semiology”, laid claim to a definition of the sign that “could seem ‘psychologistic’” (ibid: 67) because its use in discourse depends on abstract rules and structures (ibid: 232-43). Though rule-governed in use, the unity of the sign itself remains “arbitrary” (Saussure 1906-11: 67) and groundless in the face of the subject’s historicization. The diligent semiotician will notice that Foucault’s history of the sign respectively distributes the three major types of sign32 across the three epistemes with which he concerns himself: in the medieval and renaissance episteme, the icon prevails; in the “classical”, the index, as mental representation pointing to extra-mental referent, is emphasized; and in the “modern” episteme, the symbol takes the fore. It goes without saying that any viable theory of signs must recognize the relevance and currency of all three types of sign. All three operate today—or rather all three aspects function within semiosis at large—despite Foucault’s claims to the contrary. My point in all of this isn’t to wage a polemic against Foucault. There is something to be learned from him, particularly from his later work, about the outworking 32

Drawn from Peirce’s categorization of signs, the three major types of sign are: Icon, Index, and Symbol. See, besides Peirce himself, Freeman 1934 (who calls the symbol “token”): 31-4; and Sebeok 1991: 1-16.

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of normalizing forces in society. Especially where comparisons can be drawn between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty, his one-time teacher, Foucault’s insights on how “power” “inscribes” the body contribute to the understanding of what can be called “bodily” or operative intentionality (Dudrick 2005: 239-42).33 And what Thomas Flynn (1985: 5324) calls the “Foucaultian [sic] triangle” of “problematization”, “governmentality”, and “subjectivation” may be a useful metaphor for considering human experience. But Foucault’s early notion of epistemes, his telling of the history of the sign, and his later focus on the “circular” relationship between normalizing power, truth, and discourse (1977: 74) combine to produce a typical picture of knowledge and discourse on which incommensurability radically and unmediably separates both knowers and known from their others in other epistemes. And even within the “modern” episteme, arbitrariness dominates all signification, modulated only by history (as the succession of random contingencies) and, in the late Foucault (1976), the “will to know”, a thinly disguised version of Nietzsche’s “will to power” applied to the pursuit of knowledge (Schrift 1997: 153-4). I spend so much time with incommensurability in Foucault because I want to emphasize the results of the modern assumptions in conceptualizing knowledge, discourse, and meaning. I want to “deconstruct” the typical employment of the prototypically modern, Saussurean theory of significance, on which the totality of experience is understood in terms of the binary sign in its arbitrary unity, modulated only 33

Dudrick’s account of bodily intentionality sheds light on Foucault, but his grasp of Merleau-Ponty leaves a lot to be desired. But see the eighth chapter of Dillon (1997) and the first three chapters of Low (2000) as a necessary corrective to Dudrick’s incorrect (or at least incomplete) reading of Merleau-Ponty (2005: 239), “who”, he claims, “attributes the acquisition of intentionality by the body to ‘an imperceptible twist’”.

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by the random contingency of history or the imposition of a conscious or unconscious will to power (Deely 1994: ¶84ff.), the transcendental ego in disguise.34 The Foucauldian picture exemplifies this kind of Saussureanism, wherein radical incommensurability is the inescapable fact of the matter in the encounter of the other, and we must at best entertain constant suspicion of the other’s motives as well as our own, holding such meager hope as coheres with a “pessimistic activism” (Foucault 1983: 232).

Figure 4: Intersubjectivity on the Saussurean Model

34

But see, in Deely 1994, Gloss 8. on ¶96.

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For Saussure, as described in Chapter 2, meaning depends on the mental process of “association”. The linguistic sign, for Saussure, is the “psychological” reality that gives form and meaning to speech. It is a dyadic sign whose bond is constituted by mental association. Yet for Saussure, both the formal and the significant are ideal. A Saussurean or Foucauldian picture of intersubjectivity might look like Figure 4. Here sound-image B signifies the addresser’s concept A. The linguistic unit AB is comprised in its unity by its opposing other linguistic units in the static network of differences and by a mind’s “associating” A and B accordingly. Formally considered, intersubjectivity on the Saussurean model only happens if the utterer’s sound-image evokes a concept in the hearer’s mind, which itself can only happen if both share a

Figure 5: Incommensurability on the Saussurean Model

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common structure or network of differences. Whether the network is considered a “language” or an “episteme” is irrelevant because either names a system of signs. The corresponding picture of incommensurability looks like Figure 5. Here the addresser inhabits a different language or episteme from the addressee. Neither signifier B nor signified A are comprehensible to the addressee because the sign AB is not found in her language/episteme. Foucault’s uncrossable chasm encroaches, and it seems that the addressee faces, in Foucault’s words, “the stark impossibility of thinking that”. Yet a moment’s consideration will prompt a question: why can’t some overlap be effected between these distinct epistemes? What, in principle, prevents mediation? True, a partial overlap would form a new network of differences common to the interlocutors and change the sender’s sign, but that is beside the point. The answer, I argue, is Saussure’s assertion that the significant unit can only be distinguished on the synchronic view. Interpreting it in a particular way, Foucault and other proponents of radical incommensurability conceive of signification synchronically, such that meaning exists only within epistemes. Thus, a plurality of epistemes means a plurality of incommensurable meanings, and, by inference, a radical pluralism of knowledge.35 Is it really true that there is no mediation going on within the Saussurean and Foucauldian schemes? I think, to the contrary, that there is, but that its import is overlooked in favor of the insistence that “in language [and knowledge] there are only differences without positive terms” (Saussure 1906-11: 120). The truth is that there is 35

This applies even when—as in Foucault—epistemes are thought to stretch across centuries. On this view, time elapsed during an episteme is meaningless because meaning exists only within the episteme construed as a discrete unit constituting a homogenous system structuring the production of discourses. And there is no continuity between discrete systems of order. Foucault makes no attempt explain the ruptures separating them in the course of history (e.g., 1966: 217).

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mediation in Saussure: “difference” fulfills the mediating function. Foucault adds to difference the historical dimension; for he says that historical contingency is responsible for the switching of epistemes. He also later acknowledges “rules of formation” of discourse comprising “systems of dispersion”, which, though not transcendental, do nonetheless mediate the play of signs (1969: 38). Foucault is, then, a Saussurean with an eye for the diachronic, though he is careful to always respect the injunction against positivity—for what is a “rule” but a (temporary) formal regularity devoid of substance? Here, then, is the short of it: what, “in principle”, produces radical incommensurability turns out to be no principle at all. It is rather an injunction against positivity applied to all meaning by inference from the need to delineate sound-images. Clearly, difference produces “linguistic value” at the phonemic level, as Saussure (190611: 111ff.) shows—or is at least necessary for it. But the inference that the same applies to all other aspects of signification, such that difference or opposition remains the only type of mediation applying “all the way up”, as it were, is unpalatable, even to staunch Saussureans. Foucault, as we have seen, appeals to diachronic (dis)continuity and to regularities of discourse. Even Derrida, in his (in)famous paper on difference, recognizes a danger in treating difference as the productive “source” of positivities and goes out of his way in an attempt to prevent its being construed as such, positing the “trace” to make intelligible the (apparent) continuities of signification (1972: 8ff.). The notion that difference is the sole source of mediation in signification should be all the more unpalatable to the Peircean student of signs. The central thrust of what can be called “the semiotic stance” (Kockelman 2005) is the recognition of mediation.

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That is to say, what is distinctively Peircean—and distinctively semiotic—in the “semiotic stance” is the modification of the too simple “classical formula” for signification—“a sign is anything that stands for something else”—so that it becomes: “a sign is anything that stands for something else…only in some respect or capacity” (Deely 1994: ¶65). Signification is impossible without mediation, and the Peircean analysis of the categories of mediation (species, that is, of “Thirdness”), uncovers a variety of sources of mediation. The project is not yet finalized, of course, and importantly semiotics continues to pursue an understanding of the “sources of normativity” (e.g., Barrett-Fox 2005). But the import is clear: the difference between Saussurean and Peircean sign theory lies in the former’s principled denial of multiple and pertinent sources of mediation, and the latter’s principled recognition thereof. Thus semiotics accounts for intersubjectivity. Anthroposemiotics as the theory of the “human use of signs” (Deely 1994) does not sever the sign system from the world or posit an inaccessible transcendent world. Anthroposemiotic “representation”, in the sense pertinent to discussions of the umwelt and lebenswelt (Deely 1994: ¶192ff.), should be understood a “primary modeling system” (Sebeok 1991) which incorporates “nonverbal” or “extra-verbal” communication, especially, as Richard Lanigan (1972) has shown, “existential communication”. The sign, apprehendable in the (shared) physical world, contains within its very relational structure the means necessary to comprehend it. Though misunderstanding is a fact; and though historical contingencies and psychology have their roles in comprehension, communication, and knowledge; nothing in principle

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prevents intersubjectivity when approached from the Peircean perspective. Indeed, it is a reality to be accounted for, not an illusion to be undermined. Failing the notion of principled, absolute incommensurability, the Peircean will approach the notion pragmatically. Besides its mundane definition,36 incommensurability on the semiotic stance means a momentary failure of understanding, the provisional inability to commence because of the parochiality of one’s own umwelt. But it is not a showstopper. Incommensurability and the “Postmodern Condition” Foucault turns out to be as modern as he claims, but not quite in the way he intends. His modernism arguably reduces to a politicization of the modernist theory of significance. His professed ethos, that of “a permanent critique of our historical era”, rests on a maneuver typical of putative postmodernism: take the subject for ground of meaning, as in Husserl; historicize (politicize) the subject; deny the subject’s transcendence because of its place in history; announce an ongoing attempt to recover meaning though its ground is repudiated; pursue a pragmatics of purely political subjectivity. The result is not quite Derrida’s “free play” of signs about which Deely complains,37 but its consequences are similar in their typically modern character. A superior doctrine of signification would allow one to move past the supposed permanence marking Foucault’s “modern” episteme. Jean-François Lyotard’s “postmodernism”, by contrast, does not so obviously turn on a defective theory of 36

As in Kuhn (1962), wherein “incommensurability” means the lack of a “common measure” as paradigmatic theory. 37 As discussed on p. 10-11.

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significance. Yet, on Lyotard’s account of the current situation of philosophy, incommensurability imposes equally as much as on Foucault’s. Considering the relationship of scientific knowledge with “narrative” knowledge, its pre-modern predecessor, Lyotard concludes (1979: 26): It is…impossible to judge the existence or validity of narrative knowledge on the basis of scientific knowledge and vice versa: the relevant criteria are different. All we can do is gaze in wonderment at the diversity of discursive species, just as we do at the diversity of plant or animal species. Lamenting the “loss of meaning” in postmodernity boils down to mourning the fact that knowledge is no longer principally narrative. “Wonderment” in the face of exoticism is apparently not a response uniquely Foucault’s. Nor is the willingness to treat the different as incommensurably so. Indeed, Lyotard’s project hinges on a notion of incommensurability posed in terms of the “problem of legitimation” (ibid: 6). For Lyotard, the pertinent modes of legitimation—the “relevant criteria” for evaluating utterances—constitute differences that produce incommensurability between discourses. Failing for an adequate “metalanguage” (ibid: 41), a single discourse that unites all discourses in a single scheme, the problem of legitimation renders radical the incommensurability between “discursive species”. Despite the comparisons to be drawn between Lyotard and Foucault, however, Lyotard’s work (1979) has a unique, twofold aim: first, a description of knowledge in late twentieth century, Western society afflicted by the “postmodern condition”; second, the promotion of a “postmodern” conception of justice. Lyotard carries out his “report on knowledge” in terms of a pragmatics of discursive practices. This pragmatics follows a quasi-formal, loosely game-theoretical approach to discourse, taking for its paradigm

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the “language games” of Wittgenstein (1953). Language games are Lyotard’s “discursive species”. They are constituted by “rules” (“metaprescriptions”) that “specify the properties and uses” of utterances, the “moves” made by the games’ “players” (1979: 9-11). Lyotard casts the interests of game-players in light of “agonistics”. They play to win. However, society forms on the implicit or explicit contracts between players; their games form the “minimum relation required for society to exist” (ibid: 15); and, indeed, “language ‘moves’” comprise “the observable social bond” itself (ibid: 11). Language games comprise the variety of types of discourse including not only denotation, but also prescription, performance, and others. Finally, it is within the context of a language game that utterances can be judged on criteria such as “efficiency”, “beauty”, “justice”, or “truth” (ibid: 18); games provide legitimacy to utterances made under their rules. Knowledge, on this general analysis, consists in “competence” to form “utterances” that are accepted by players of the games of knowledge. The games of knowledge are plural and incommensurable. This fact appears on two disparate views of them. The first is a positive analysis of the form of utterances produced within them. In science, for example, players make denotative utterances and proffer “proof” for them, seeking the assent of their hearers (Lyotard 1979: 23-4). By contrast, players in the game of poetics experiment with language. Story-tellers need not relay facts (ibid: 17). Thus, in addition to competence in science, any kind of “expertise”—technical, aesthetic, ethical—counts as knowledge. However, science remains the privileged form of knowledge in postmodern society and the focus of Lyotard’s analysis. Comprised of “denotative statements with truth-value”, scientific

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knowledge excludes all of the “other language games” (ibid 30). Importantly, though, science also divides into a plurality of incommensurable formal systems: kinds of symbolism and argumentation (ibid: 41-7). The second view is negative: an account of the breakdown of modernity that results in “the postmodern condition”. For the modern account of the social bond is principally of the form of “metanarrative”. Modernism recognizes the multiplicity of knowledge-games including description, prescription, and narration (recognition of them initiates modernity), but seeks to unite them under “metanarratives”. The pragmatics of narrative is such that narratives as forms of knowledge contain within them their own legitimation (Lyotard 1979: 18-23). Thus, metanarratives are self-legitimizing stories about the “hero of knowledge” that make sense of the plural forms of knowledge in modern society (ibid: 31-37). On a Kantian metanarrative of enlightenment, this hero is “the people” who attain liberty by acquiring universal truth. On the Hegelian metanarrative, the “Spirit” as “meta-subject” evolves towards perfect self-knowledge through the dialectic of history. The one legitimizes knowledge by making it the means for humanity to be free from tyranny. The other legitimizes knowledge by placing it within a speculative philosophy of history on which knowledge is the Spirit’s own unfolding. Both fail because of an “internal erosion” brought about by both capitalism and “an idea of perspective” on which the presuppositions informing the speculative hierarchy and the humanistic project of emancipation are questioned (ibid: 38-9). In short, the “demand for legitimation” precipitates “a process of deligitimation” that “takes us in the direction of postmodern culture” (ibid). At the failure of the metanarratives,

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knowledge “splinters” into the multiplicity of incommensurable language games the metanarratives were to unite. With the onset, finally, of the “computerization of society”, technology comes to play a major role in the “production” of scientific knowledge. Because of the reciprocal relation between technology and wealth, scientific knowledge becomes “a force of production” (Lyotard 1979: 45). In this way, science, the paradigm of contemporary knowledge, takes on an economico-political aspect. With the politicization of knowledge comes a new, de facto mode of the legitimation of knowledge: legitimate knowledge becomes that which is paid for. And what is paid for must be profitable; it must perform efficiently. Scientific knowledge thus falls under legitimation by the “performativity principle” (ibid: 50), such that “[t]he question…now asked by the…student, the State, or institutions of higher education is no longer ‘Is it true?’ but ‘What use is it?’” (ibid: 51). “Competence” to produce “good utterances” (ibid: 25) becomes the control of the technology requisite for producing proof. The shift to legitimation by performativity has a dark aspect; it excludes the useless (i.e., the unprofitable) and becomes an instrument of power. Because controlling the context in which games are played increases one’s efficiency in playing them, the performativity principle makes power the ultimate, self-legitimating source of the legitimation of knowledge (1979: 46-7). It rules by what Lyotard calls “terror”: enforcing performativity by threatening opposing players in the games of knowledge with elimination by force (ibid). With this state of affairs, the “postmodern condition” fully emerges.

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Critically, Lyotard’s report on knowledge in postmodernity demands an equally “postmodern” theory of social justice. Though gaming forms the “social bond” (1979: 14ff.), and individuals enter into social relations when they start playing games, the games should not be reified, even when they are embodied in institutions. They have flexible rules, shifting boundaries, and fluctuating importance. New moves can be introduced, changing the game being played. “[T]he boundaries only stabilize when they cease to be stakes in the game” (ibid: 17). Players do not have permanent roles; their relationships can and do change; and a plurality of discursive forms appear within institutions based on single forms of discourse. The threat of the performativity principle, in light of the open-endedness of gaming, is to squelch all of the many existing games and potential new games that do not perform efficiently. That is, its end is to eliminate utterances that are not performative. Because of this, Lyotard’s notion of justice is monolithic, unlike his notion of knowledge. It does not reduce to a game or multiply into many games, because it concerns subjects as players of games. Justice, on Lyotard’s account, is the reverse of the terror of performativity. While “terror” means the use of force to silence the voices of others in discourse, justice, by contrast, allows the others to speak. A just society is one that allows everyone to play the games, to participate in “communicational interaction”. Finally, the duty of the postmodern researcher lies in opposing the performativity principle. Science provides an “antimodel” of the “stable system” of technocratic society governed by performativity (ibid: 64). Only discoveries and researches constituting radical new moves can unsettle its equilibrium; they change the very rules of the games in which they are played. Lyotard

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calls such research “paralogy” (ibid: 60). He concludes that one way to remedy the “postmodern condition”, to move towards justice in postmodernity, is to make the games of knowledge “games of perfect information” by giving universal free access to computerized knowledge. Thus, the problem of knowledge, on the “postmodern condition”, is the question of its legitimation. Both its significance and its legitimacy are tied up in its role in social practice; they have their reality contextually, from game to game. It is not, however, simply the collapse of modernism that produces this situation. It also owes to Lyotard’s method. His analysis of knowledge in terms of language games—in terms, that is, of rules and utterances—seems to treat knowledge as exterior to knowing subjects. On one construal, Lyotard’s methodological exteriorization of knowledge makes discourse groundless, since it achieves legitimacy only in the temporary assent of its hearers. He supposedly claims that discourse is disconnected from its referent; it is absurd; the postmodern condition is an abyss of discursive fragments void of significance. Deely construes matters this way. On his account, Lyotard falls into the putative postmodern camp that has “done away with linear time and linear argument, and shows at the heart of every text a void” (2001: 611). Certainly one can see how Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition, can be taken that way. He often seems to place himself in that camp; he claims, for example, “the question of proof is problematical since proof needs to be proven” (1979: 44). He casts doubt on scientific “discovery” (ibid: 27-8) and even the very possibility of a “scientific observation” (ibid: 44). Because

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of its criticism of the past and present states of knowledge in the Western world, the work can be read as an attack on the whole history of Western thought. Yet such a construal misses Lyotard’s point; Lyotard demands not the destruction of Western rationality (for it has already “collapsed” on its own), but instead recognition of “a major shift in the notion of reason” that has taken place (1979: 43). The exteriorization of knowledge is not Lyotard’s suggestion but rather the very state of affairs that needs to be addressed. This exteriorization has enabled knowledge to take on the roles Lyotard assigns it: a force of production, a commodity, the content of computer memory banks. A pragmatics of language games has efficacy in dealing with the situation. It can both account for and deal with the postmodern condition, on which knowledge has acquired an unprecedented instrumental value. His concern, to put it another way, is not to undermine knowledge, but to report on the very significance of knowledge in postmodern times. Knowledge is a stake in the game(s) played between technocracy and subject. It stands outside the social bond (ibid: 25), though it relates imperatively to it. Exteriorization is thus a central characteristic of knowledge on the postmodern condition. The collapse of narrative knowledge and the rise of science to its place of privilege in technocratic postmodernity, says Lyotard, make of knowledge not a question of competence embodied in subjects but instead a commodity for the use by experts. Here, again, Lyotard’s conclusions elicit a comparison with Foucault. Lyotard’s exteriorized, commodified knowledge stands in a relation to “postmodern culture” much like the “circular” relationship between normalizing power, truth, and discourse in

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Foucault’s “modernity” (1977: 74). Lyotard’s method for treating contemporary, scientific knowledge also resembles Foucault’s suggestion, in the foreword to the English edition of The Order of Things, for “the historical analysis of scientific discourse”: he says that it “should...be subject, not to a theory of the knowing subject, but rather to a theory of discursive practice” (1966: xiv). Lyotard’s interest is the sociology of knowledge rather than its history, of course, but a central difference lies in how Foucault and Lyotard respectively construe the “theory of discursive practice”. For Foucault, the emphasis lies in the discursive aspect of “discursive practice”. He pursues the regularities of discourse without concern for their origin in practice, thus opening for description a “vast field...made up of the totality of all effective statements” (1969: 267). For Lyotard, the opposite is true. Discourse matters because it constitutes the social bond, with its demand for justice. Utterances and “sets of statements”, the embodiment of “learning” (1979: 18-9), demand the question of their legitimacy. The question cannot be bracketed. Lyotard’s concern, in short, is the source(s) of normativity. His pragmatics thus stands over against Foucault’s theory of discourse, which as we saw above fails, in a typically Saussurean way, to treat the sources of normativity. Lyotard’s concern for normativity in the guise of “legitimacy”, further, is not the only surprising difference. Crucially, Lyotard’s very approach, he tells us in a note (1979: 87n28), is based in part on “Peirce’s semiotics”. Indeed, it turns out that Lyotard is opposed to exactly the kind of so-called “semiotics”, which is better called “semiology”, proffered by Foucault. Scott Simpkins (1995) shows that Lyotard criticizes, in his Economie Libidinale (1974), the modern theory of significance, which

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under the guise of an illegitimate “semiotics” transforms the doctrine of signs into a “stultifying nihilism” (Simpkins 1995: 3). Simpkins (ibid) notes that Lyotard offers some prompting to move away from a “sterile”, “structuralist” theory of endlessly deferring signs. Yet Lyotard’s own attempt to improve the situation, in that work, lacks the historical grounding to promote an adequate semiotics. He offers, says Simpkins (ibid), a “vertiginous semiotics” rooted in libidinal “force”. There Lyotard is more concerned with the “intensity” of signs than their ontology. Nonetheless, Lyotard’s earlier criticism therein of semiology (1974) and his later focus (1979) on the sources of normativity embodied in “communicational interaction” show that on at least one major point, he lies much closer to a genuine semiotics than to the modern theory of significance. Making sense of this claim—elaborating, that is, on this “one major point” that would place Lyotard closer to semiotic rather than putative postmodernism—requires one final reconsideration of semiotics. It will be brief. I claimed, during my discussion of Foucault above, that the fundamental difference between the “semiotic stance” and the modern theory of significance is the semiotic recognition of “multiple and pertinent sources of normativity”. I also noted that the project of accounting for normativity is unfinished. What I implied but did not say, what will bring us back full-circle to Deely’s account of postmodernism as semiotics, and what finally will make sense of Lyotard in this light, is that semiotics is and has been—ever since Peirce’s inception of it as we know it today—rooted in pragmatism.

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Peirce’s theory of interpretants, the basis for the semiotic account of normativity, grounds the semiotic ontology of relations in the self-correcting, historical “drama” of a “self-conscious” community of “experimental inquirers”. The Peircean theory of significance, says Vincent Colapietro (2004: 12-3), must be understood in this way to avoid “excessively formal and indeed formalistic interpretations of Peirce’s theory of signs” (ibid: 11). According to Colapietro, Peirce recognizes that “knowing takes time” (ibid: 18), and significance arises as “a function of habit” (ibid: 15). The significance of an object depends on the motivations and purposes of the subject; these can be either “idiosyncratic” or “constitutive” depending on the agent’s proclivities (ibid: 22). Indeed, incommensurability, one might say, arises from the “idiosyncrasies” or what I have called the “parochiality” of knowing and speaking subjects. By contrast, an “exemplary” agent whose motivations and purposes owe to the “sanctions” of “some historically evolved practice” such as self-critical, experimental inquiry will find in her continuing encounter with the object a decided constraint owing to it. In short, normativity on Peirce’s semiotics is rooted in the various practices of individuals, communities, and institutions, insofar as those practices become “habits of mind”. Insofar as postmodernism as semiotics would be Peircean, then, it must incorporate the pragmatic account of normativity. Recognizing this has the effect of showing Deely’s account of postmodernism as semiotics to be incomplete in another way: its emphasis on the formal structure of the sign minimizes the role of this critical element. Further, it shows that Deely’s identification of the putative postmodernists is too “quick and dirty”. Lyotard should not be excluded from postmodernism as semiotics

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because he does not lean on the modern theory of significance, for as I pointed out above, he criticizes it; and, more importantly, his emphasis on the pragmatic source of normativity (in his words, the “legitimacy” deriving from “communicational interaction”) places him, as he claims, on the Peircean side of the semiological/semiotic divide. Though he underplays the “self-critical” aspect of Peirce’s pragmatism, Lyotard at least understands, along with Peirce but pace Deely, the import of practice. We can conclude from this that speculative philosophy does not cleanly separate from practical philosophy. True, a genuine postmodernism must begin with a truly postmodern theory of significance; it must surpass a typically modern ontology. John Deely’s account of postmodernism as semiotics, if exclusivist and narrow in its focus, provides a basis for this genuine postmodernism. But a legitimate postmodern ontology must be grounded in the pragmatics of inquiry.

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