alexandros ph. lagopoulos* a meta-theoretical approach to

Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos*

A meta-theoretical approach to the historyand theory of semiotics

DOI 10.1515/sem-2015-0100

Abstract: The object of this paper is the domain of semiotic theories, from“traditional” semiotics to poststructuralism and postmodernism, excluding“semiotizing” approaches such as phenomenology or cultural studies. Thus, itis metatheoretical. It is based on two matrices. The first maps semiotic theorieson the basis of the continuity or discontinuity between them. The second dis-plays the logical categories of the relationship between semiotics and Marxism,which has historically been an important influence on the field. The paperpresents the views of the main authors of the domain in terms of these twomatrices. Some of the conclusions are: (a) the irreconcilability betweenSaussurean and Peircean semiotics; (b) the greater historical development ofthe former in comparison to the latter; (c) the different orientation betweenCentral and Eastern European semiotics on the one hand and French semioticson the other; (d) the strong influence of Saussure and Levi-Straussian structur-alism on poststructuralism; (e) the increase of the influence of Marxism fromstructuralism to poststructuralism; and (f) the transformation from poststructur-alism to North American postmodernism.

The paper closes with some thoughts about the present status of the mainsemiotic currents and a proposal for a fertile future orientation for semiotics.

Keywords: semiotics, poststructuralism, postmodernism, biosemiotics, cognitivesemiotics, Marxism

1 Theoretical observations

The object of the present paper1 is not any specific semiotic system, in which case thelevel of analysis would be theoretical, i. e., metalinguistic. My object is the domain of

*Corresponding author: Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos, School of Architecture, Aristotle Universityof Thessaloniki, and Academy of Athens, Greece, E-mail: [email protected]

1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 10th Congress of the Hellenic SemioticSociety, Volos, 4–6 October 2013.

Semiotica 2016; 213: 1–42

semiotic theories in the strict sense – that is, excluding semiotizing approaches, suchas phenomenology or the British school of cultural studies – and the emphasisis placed on their own and their comparative semiotic nature; given this object, myapproach is meta-theoretical. Semiotic theories of the last century will be comparedwith their source of origin, namely, the work of Saussure and Peirce respectively,aswell aswith each other, and also therewill be a comparisonbetween the theories ofthese two authors.Within this framework, the guiding theoretical principle andmajoraxis of analysis for comparison will be the opposition continuity versus discontinuity,both covered by the even more general concept of “change.” These two poles mayseem straightforward, but it becomes clear on closer scrutiny that they are too generaland not necessarily exclusive. From the further analysis of this binary pair, thereemerges a series of concepts defining the following analytical categories (Table 1):

(1) Continuity:(a) lack of theoretical development between the succeeding theory and

the initial theory, which I consider as “stagnation” and which resultsin repetition,

(b) direct development, which I shall call “direct dynamic continuity”and which results in an “elaborated variant” of the initial theory,

Table 1: Degree of continuity and/or discontinuity between semiotic theories.

Relationship Original theory Related to Research object

Continuity Stagnation Peirce Later developments Greatly extendedDirect dynamiccontinuity

Saussure Linguistic Circle ofCopenhagen, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes,Eco, Greimas

Greatly extended

Direct dynamiccontinuity

Poststructuralism Postmodernism Comparable

Moderatediscontinuity incontinuity

Saussure Russian Formalism,Prague LinguisticCircle, Moscow-TartuSchool of Semiotics

Greatly extended

Markeddiscontinuityin continuity

Structuralism Poststructuralism Comparable

Discontinuity Continuity indiscontinuityRupture Saussure Peirce

2 Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos

(c) less direct development, which I call “moderate discontinuity incontinuity” and which results in a “less close variant,” and

(d) transformation, which I shall call “marked discontinuity in continuity”and which results in a new variant.

(2) Discontinuity:(a) radical transformation, which I consider as “continuity in discontinu-

ity” and which results in a new form, and(b) rupture, which I shall call “radical discontinuity” and which results in

a different form.

These concepts will compose the theoretical matrix for the comparison of thedifferent semiotic currents. They are completed with an assessment of the degree towhich the area of application of a theory was extended in comparison to that of apreceding theory. This assessment does not refer to the type of change of the theory,but to that of its object of analysis: thus, the limits of the domain of the object mayremain more or less “comparableor they may be “greatly extended.”

My second axis of analysis turns towards the external influences on semiotictheories. I selected Marxism, due to its strong influence on poststructuralism.In such a case, we deal with the relationship between two theories, (A), theinfluencing theory (Marxism), and (B), the theory influenced (semiotics).The analytical categories of these relationships are the following (Table 2):

(1) theory (A) is articulated with (B) on equal terms, in which case a newepistemological field is created,

(2) theory (A) integrates (B), (A) functioning as the wider framework of (B), thelatter conserving most of its structural traits,

Table 2: Possible relationships between Marxist theory and semiotics.

Relationship Semiotic theory

Theory (A) is articulated with (B) on equal termsTheory (A) integrates (B) Medvedev and Bakhtin, Bourdieu, Barthes,

Rossi-Landi, social semioticsTheory (A) is integrated by (B) Structural MarxismTheory (A) is partially used by (B) EcoTheory (B) is partially used by (A)Theory (A) is absorbed by (B) Lévi-Strauss, Poststructuralism,

PostmodernismTheory (B) is absorbed by (A)

Meta-theoretical approach to semiotics 3

(3) theory (A) is integrated by (B), (B) functioning as the wider framework of(A), the latter conserving most of its structural traits,

(4) theory (A) is used partially by (B), that is, elements of theory (A) are usedby (B), without any structural alteration of (B),

(5) theory (B) is used partially by (A), that is, elements of theory (B) are usedby (A), without any structural alteration of (A),

(6) theory (A) is absorbed by (B), losing its structural traits, and thus it isradically transformed by (B), and

(7) theory (B) is absorbed by (A), losing its structural traits, and thus it isradically transformed by (A).

2 The course of Peircean semiotics

It has become a ritual habit in introductory courses in semiotics, handbooks onsemiotics and semiotic papers to pay respects to the two founders of semiotics,Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce. This act is on the one handjustified both theoretically, since the theories of both authors treat of signs, andhistorically, since their life spans largely overlap (Peirce: 1839–1914; Saussure: 1857–1913). On the other hand, it levels out major differences, epistemological, theoreticaland historical. Epistemological, because Saussure, a linguist, worked as a scientistand was interested in the study of natural language and by extension of all culturalsystems, his “sign” referring exclusively to the latter: thus, his sémiologie is socio-logical; while Peirce, educated as a chemist, opted for philosophy andwas interestedin the philosophy of knowledge, his “sign” and “semiotic” forming part of a theoryof logic: his approach is logical. Theoretical, because Peirce formulates a theory ofthe individual sign and its classifications, while Saussure, together with a theory ofthe sign, formulates a theory of the relationships between signs, opening the way toa theory of a whole of signs, the text. The historical difference is that the develop-ment of the two approaches was quite uneven, as will become clear below. Anepistemological rupture divides the two approaches (Table 1).

The diffusion of Peircean semiotics during the first three quarters of the twen-tieth century was extremely slow. Peirce was known and admired among philoso-phers: Bertrand Russell considered him as the greatest American philosopher andKarl Popper as one of the greatest philosophers of all times. An anthology of Peirce’swritings was first published in 1923 and followed the landmark publication of thesix first volumes of Collected Papers (1931). However, there was no diffusion ofPeirce’s theory before World War II and only one author, Charles W. Morris, can beconsidered as his successor during this period. As Morris (1971: 7) states, he washelped in his 1925 doctoral dissertation by Charles K. Ogden and Ivor A. Richards’s


The Meaning of Meaning – one appendix of their book is dedicated to Peirce (Ogdenand Richards 1923: 269–290) – though his supervisor George H. Mead did not knowPeirce’s ideas. Morris refers to Peirce in 1932 in his Six Theories of Mind and reliesheavily on him in his Foundations of the Theory of Signs (1938; included in Morris1971: 13–71). In 1946, Morris translated Peirce’s terms for the triadic sign intobehavioral terms, in the hope that in this way semiotics could be instituted as anempirical science. There were some random publications by Peirce’s followers afterthe War and in 1965 the journal Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society(a society founded in 1946) began to appear, including papers on Peirce, onpragmatism (of which he was the founder) and generally on American philosophy.

A key role in the diffusion of Peirce’s ideas after the War was played byThomas A. Sebeok. Born in 1920, he read The Meaning of Meaning at a youngage. When Morris became Research Professor at the University of Florida in1958, Sebeok followed his courses; aside from Morris he was also influenced byRoman Jakobson and Peirce. As Sebeok himself recounts, he first became inter-ested in what he calls animal communication in 1962 and soon turned tosemiotics. The result was the delimitation of a new field, “zoosemiotics” (seeKull 2003: 50), a term he introduced in 1963. We observe from the bibliographyof Sebeok’s writings from 1942 to 1985 that up to 1962, his papers concernlinguistics and folkloric studies; his first paper on communication in subhumanspecies, “Coding in the Evolution of Signalling Behavior,” appeared in 1962,followed in 1963 by “Communication in Animals and Men”; in 1964 he partici-pated in congresses dealing with semiotics; and in 1965 he published the paper“Zoosemiotics: A New Key to Linguistics” (Bouissac et al. 1986: 575–82).

The semiotics of zoosemiotics draw on Morris, who acted as a bridgebetween Peirce and Sebeok (Martinelli 2010: 4.171; Martinelli et al. 2011: 1).About 15 years later, Sebeok extended zoosemiotics to “biosemiotics,” a con-cept on which he had some doubts for more than half a decade; this passagewas effected due to the decisive influence of the biologist Jakob von Uexküll(Kull 2003: 51–52) and a direct grounding in Peirce’s semiotics. Sebeok hadread von Uexküll in a bad translation as a student, but only much later readthe text in German and from 1977 on (Kull 2007: 13) used these ideas as a majorinspiration. In 1984, a manifesto of Sebeok’s new orientation was published inSemiotica (Anderson et al. 1984) – a copy of which the present author acquiredin mimeographed form, since it was distributed during the Third InternationalCongress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in Palermo,Sicily, in 1984.2 This manifesto wants to promote a new “paradigm” in

2 This manifesto is the only Peircean text comparable to the Saussurean Schools and Theses.


semiotics, proposing a general and global semiotics, there called “ecumenicalsemiotics,” which would bring together on the one hand the social, cognitive,and humanistic sciences, and on the other the “life sciences.” Zoosemioticsmay be considered as the first Peircean theory that created a school.Biosemiotics, its extension to the whole of life, should count as a secondschool in the Peircean tradition.

Sebeok’s ambitious “global semiotics” includes “anthroposemiotics,” that is,the semiotics of culture, as only one part of it, the other part being biosemiotics,studying natural processes in all kinds of living organisms; he avoids the furtherextensions of semiotics to a “semiophysics,” transcending life to include the studyof inorganic matter, but the idea seems to attract some Peircean semioticians. ForSebeok, semiosis coincides with life and he divides biosemiotics into “zoosemio-tics,” “phytosemiotics” (plant semiotics), and “mycosemiotics” (fungus semiotics);he also defines four levels of “endosemiosis,” that is, the processes that he con-siders as transmissions of signs inside the organisms of the above classes (Sebeok1997). Sebeok played a central role in the universal diffusion of Peirce, zoosemiotics,and biosemiotics, a wave that encountered both classical semiotics (today margin-alized) and the dominant Poststructuralism/Postmodernism (on Peirce, Ogden andRichards, Morris, and Sebeok, see also Lagopoulos 2004: 75–76, 98–101, 103–14;Gottdiener et al. 2003: vol.1).

In terms of the matrix I introduced above, Peircean scholars have thetendency to stay with Peirce’s work, without developing it, an attitude reminis-cent of the hermeneutic tradition. Peircean semiotics is marked by theoreticalstagnation. On the other hand, its research object has been greatly extended,even more if we take into account that there have been attempts to applyPeircean semiotics to the domain of cultural studies.

3 The continuity of development of Saussureansemiotics

3.1 Central and Eastern European structuralism and semiotics

Peircean and Saussurean semiotics3 follow asymptotic courses; a radical dis-continuity separates these two semiotic paradigms. Saussurean scholars choose

3 I use the term in a general sense to include, besides structuralism and semiotics, Frenchpoststructuralism and North American postmodernism.


to ignore Peircean semiotics while following the school of their preference andsimultaneously developing their field, as we shall see; on the other hand,Peircean scholars are frequently explicitly critical of Saussurean semiotics(for example, of Saussurean binarism, which is considered as inferior toPeirce’s triadic definition of the sign). Sometimes, some concepts from the onecamp slip into the other or, more consciously, there is a superficial and (very)partial use or even a (very) partial attempt at integration of concepts from theother camp – as, for example, is the case with the use of certain Peirceanconcepts by Eco in the context of Saussurean semiotics – but this is independentfrom any general epistemological synthesis. It is only a convenient ad hocborrowing, which works only so far as the borrowed concept is treated asisolated from its wider epistemological foundation.

Unlike the development of Peircean theory, a succession of semiotic schoolsbased on Saussurean theory have appeared. They are usually discussed in alinear fashion, according to their historical appearance. A closer look at them,however, shows two discrete general tendencies, one Central and EasternEuropean and one French, which of course were not isolated from each other.I shall start with the first tendency.

Roman Jakobson was the main propagator of Saussurean theory and a majorpersonality of Russian formalism (1914–1934). Russian formalism evolvedthrough three stages and during the last stage greatly widened the horizons ofsemiotics when its interest was focused on the relation of a text to its environ-ment. This relation was conceived in two ways. The first is the insertion of thetext into larger systems up to the cultural system as a whole, considered to bethe “system of systems,” and the relationship between texts, that is, intertex-tuality. The second kind of relation between text and environment is founded onthe communication circuit and focuses on the communication space betweenauthor or text and reader, including a wide set of mediations, such as thebehavior of economic agencies, literary institutions and circles, and publicopinion (Sebeok 1994 [1986]: Russian Formalism).

The tireless Jakobson moved to Prague in the early 1920s and was active inthe foundation of the Prague Linguistic Circle (1926), the successor of formalism.In 1929 he was a co-author of the Theses of the Prague Circle (see Winner 1998),which were influenced by Husserl’s phenomenology, went beyond formalismand marked the constitution of structuralism (Steiner 1982), a term introducedby Jakobson. The general approach of the Theses is structural-functional andthey pose major semiotic issues, such as the relationship between langue andparole, as well as that between synchrony and diachrony, the sentence insteadof the word as the linguistic unit, and the concept of “poetic function.”Emphasis is also given to the phonological study of langue, developed on the


basis of Saussure by Nikolai Sergeyevich Troubetzkoy. Natural language is seenas only one of the semiotic systems, and other systems, such as literature andthe arts, are considered as objects of study, the whole of these systems consti-tuting culture as a complex system of communication.

The Moscow-Tartu School of Semiotics, the descendant of Russian formal-ism and the Prague Linguistic Circle, was founded in 1964, around the centralpersonality of Juri M. Lotman; the successor of the School since 1990 is the TartuSemiotic School, based at the University of Tartu in Estonia. This school also hadthree phases, and during the third phase (1970–1979) formulated a manifesto onthe semiotics of culture, the Theses on the Semiotic Study of Cultures (Uspenskijet al. 1973). In these Theses, culture is considered as the object of semiotics, thetypology of cultures as its main object, and the text as the basic unit of culture.Culture is conceived as a holistic cybernetic system, composed of relativelyautonomous, functionally correlated, and hierarchically ordered semiotic sub-systems. There is an opposition between culture and non-culture. Immanentanalysis must be combined with functional analysis, that is, the study of therelationships between semiotic structures, and synchrony must be combinedwith diachrony. There is in every culture a differentiation between naturallanguage, usually considered as the “primary modelling system,” and all othersystems, which are built on language and are as such “secondary modellingsystems.” In every culture there are two opposite types of signs, the tensionbetween which is a major mechanism of culture: verbal signs, which are dis-crete, and iconic signs, which are non-discrete and continuous. According to thethesis on secondary modelling systems, the iconic systems should also befounded on language, but on this point there are diverging views within theSchool, such as that of Lotman himself who believes that the iconic systemshave their own specificity.

In the early 1980s Lotman formulated the concept of “semiosphere,”which wasconsidered as an important development of the School. Without abandoning closeties with the Theses, he used as his prototype in a metaphorical manner thebiological concept of “biosphere,” whence he conceives of the semiosphere as asemiotic continuum and as a presupposition of the cultural sub-systems. HereLotman unfortunately anchors the basic structure of all semiotic systems in theright-left asymmetry of the human brain, and argues that this is a universalstructure ruling everything from the genetic-molecular level to the structure of theuniverse (Lotman 2005, 1990). In this manner he proposes an ambitious, bold, andorganicist synthesis of the positive sciences and cultural studies, subject to thetypical and visible danger of metaphorical thinking.

As I believe is clear from the development of the above three schools, whilethey remain generally faithful to the Saussurean theory, they hold a dynamic


view on the semiotic systems which is not found in Saussure, and show a specialinterest in the study of texts, that is parole, which was for Saussure of secondaryimportance. In fact, already from its first stage, Russian formalism showed aspecial interest in aesthetic texts, namely, literature and the arts. Thus, the threeschools may be characterized, when compared to Saussure, as moderate dis-continuity in continuity, offering loose variants of their prototype.Simultaneously, they greatly extended Saussure’s research object (Table 1).

3.2 French structuralism and semiotics

The case is different with the French line of semiotics, because it is more strictlySaussurean; it can be considered as “classical” or “orthodox” semiotics. My firstreference is to the most Saussurean among Saussureans, Louis Hjelmslev (1961[1943]). The major representative of the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen (1931),Hjelmslev together with Hans Jørgen Uldall elaborated “glossematics” (1936), inthe form of a “linguistic algebra,” as a general theory of semiotics (see, for example,Johansen 1998). Eventually, Hjelmslev’s theory heavily influenced the course ofFrench semiotics.

During World War II, Claude Lévi-Strauss met and took classes from Jakobsonin the New School for Social Research in New York. Under Jakobson’s stronginfluence, he was introduced to structuralism, from which emerged his structuralanthropology. Lévi-Strauss’s model is Jakobson’s and Nikolai Trubetzkoy’s struc-tural phonology. For Jakobson, phonemes are defined by the oppositions betweenthem, and the articulatory or acoustical traits by which these oppositions aredescribed constitute their distinctive features. The latter appear in the form of binaryoppositions, are limited in number and are organized according to a universalmatrix, fromwhich it is supposed that each existing language borrows the elementsof its phonological system. This model4 is precisely themodel that founds structuralanthropology.

Following Jakobson’s and Trubetzkoy’s views, Lévi-Strauss states that, justas phonology, anthropology moves from conscious phenomena to their uncon-scious “infrastructure” in the mind, focuses not on elements but on theirrelationships, is concerned with structures and formulates universal laws.Lévi-Strauss finds close parallels between kinship systems and phonologicalsystems, although he believes that caution is needed against too literal a

4 It may be contrasted to the historically sensitive view that comparable phonemes in differentlanguages do not coincide, with the result that phonological systems differ and phonologycannot be universal (see Ducrot and Schaeffer 1995: 390–391, 394–395).


transfer from linguistics to anthropology. According to Lévi-Strauss, hisapproach to anthropology is founded on a theory of communication, namely,the exchange of messages, based on the rules of linguistics; the exchange ofwomen between social groups, based on rules of kinship and marriage; and theexchange of goods and services, based on economic laws. He situates hisanthropology on the plane of signification and calls it a “scienceséméiologique” (Lévi-Strauss 1958: 39–44, 48–49, 57, 95–96, 399).

About 15 years after Levi-Strauss’s establishment of structural anthropologywith his Ph.D. thesis, semiotics as sémiologie, a novel approach to structuralismemerging from Levi-Straussian structuralism, was founded with RolandBarthes’s landmark Éléments de sémiologie (1964). It is Barthes’s merit that hetook the next big step after Lévi-Strauss. While without any doubt stronglyinfluenced by the latter, he went back to the source, Saussure, and his strictestfollower, Hjelmslev. This origin is manifest in the title of his work above, the firsttreatise of European semiotics, because he replaces the formalist term “struc-tural” with the Saussurean “sémiologie.” In creating a semiotics of culture byanalyzing and interconnecting different cultural (sub–)systems, Lévi-Strausswas helped by the object of his field, given that anthropology studies culturein all its aspects, but such a holistic cultural semiotics was also sought byBarthes (for example, Barthes 1957), Algirdas Julien Greimas (for example,Greimas and Courtés 1979) and Umberto Eco, who is easily classified in theFrench tradition (for example, Eco 1972 [1968] and 1976).

Eco’s above mentioned books, La structure absente and A Theory ofSemiotics, draw from the same sources as Barthes, as well as from Bartheshimself, but also draw on certain ideas from Peirce (a notable exception of aEuropean reference to Peirce, another one being Jakobson); these books are thefirst extended handbooks of European semiotics. They revolve around langueand, advancing beyond Saussure, around issues of communication, that is, thecircuit of parole, but Eco does not extend his work to a systematic analysis ofparole. This was done by the French literary semioticians and was given its mostcomplete form by Greimas, the founder of the Semiolinguistic Research Group,also known as the School of Paris. Greimas completed Saussure’s study oflangue with a sophisticated semiotics of parole. In the early 1990s Greimasopened new paths for semiotics with his “semiotics of passions,” which makethe leap beyond binarism by taking into account the spectrum of “less” and“more” between two semantic poles (Greimas and Fontanille 1991).

With the French school we witness a direct development of a dynamiccontinuity from Saussure and the production of elaborated variants of histheory. Thus, it is closer to Saussure than the Central and Eastern Europeantrend in semiotics. Due to this closeness the dimension of langue weighs more


heavily on the French semiotic orientation, with as a result a more staticcharacter and a loss of the focus on diachrony and the dynamic relationshipsbetween semiotic systems that are part of the Central and Eastern Europeantrend. Just as Central and Eastern European semiotics, however, the Frenchschool greatly extended the research object of semiotics in comparison toSaussure’s original theory (Table 1).

4 The influence of Saussure and Lévi-Strausson poststructuralism

In order to assess the influence of Saussure and Lévi-Strauss on poststructural-ism we need to examine some of their major concepts. We shall start with Lévi-Strauss.

Lévi-Strauss’s conception of culture coincides both with the formalist andthe structuralist definition of it as a system of systems. Society for him iscomposed of a set of interrelated “orders,” such as the kinship system, socialorganization, mythology or the culinary system, each of which has the form of astructure. The formal properties of the relationships between these orders, whichare highly abstract, constitute the “order of orders” of a society (Lévi-Strauss1958: 346–348, 363–366). Lévi-Strauss sets himself the task of studying humanuniversals and believes that “primitive” societies offer the ideal ground for thestudy, in its pure form, of the innate and unconscious universal logic; theunconscious is identified with the symbolic function, which imposes structurallaws (Lévi-Strauss 1958: 40–41, 224–225 and 1955: 469–470).

Lévi-Strauss is in search of a kind of semantic algebra, which takes the formof an algebraic matrix. His methodology is the following. He starts by assigning,in an oversimplified manner as he admits, the mathematical symbol + to gen-erally positive relationships and the symbol – to generally negative relation-ships. Then, he combines these relationships to create individual structureswhich incorporate pairs of opposition; he thus formulates a synchronic law ofcorrelation. An individual structure belongs to a family of kindred structures,related to each other by rules of transformation and constituting a group oftransformations; this is a system, ruled by a structure, which is a structural law.The overall whole of these groups follows general structural laws, which accord-ing to him are few. There is also a diachronic change of structures due to theirconflict with chance (historical) events, which themselves are not structural, butdiachronic change is structural and follows a rule of transformation. Exactly thesame rules apply to diachronic change in time and synchronic change in


geographical space observed in the case of synchronic comparisons, with as aresult that the synchronic structures are replicated by the diachronic structures(Lévi-Strauss 1958: 49–60, 225, 252, 306, 342, 366). This theoretical foundationhas multiple ramifications, some of which we shall immediately visit.

It seems to me clear that with structural diachrony historical change loses itshistoricity, because history is frozen within an a priori, which is the a-temporal,a-historical, super-synchronic unconscious matrix. While we may well conceivethat it is history that creates the structures, Lévi-Strauss is not of the sameopinion. For him, there is a struggle between history (that is, conjuncture,events) and system (the structural elements). The system may resist, be provi-sionally deregulated, even transformed, but system it remains. He believes thathis proposal identifies real history and the systemic diachronic history of theanthropologist is objective. His history concerns a “mechanical” time, which isreversible and non-cumulative, contrary to the historian’s history, which con-cerns a “statistical” time, which is not reversible and has a determined temporalorientation (Lévi-Strauss 1962: 92, 207, 212, 342 and 1958: 314).

This history of the historians is not objective for Lévi-Strauss. Process isnot an analytical object and cannot be studied together with structure. Thehistorical fact is not given, it is constituted by abstraction, and this is equallytrue for its selection. This way of operating is used both by the historical agentand the historian. History is made possible because a certain group of eventsin a given period acquires approximately the same signification for a specificgroup and different experiences by different social groups, for example inrespect to the French Revolution, lead to different and equally true histories.Lévi-Strauss concludes: “L’histoire n’est donc jamais l’histoire, mais l’histoire-pour” (‘So, history is never history, but history for someone’; Lévi-Strauss 1962:339–342, 347–348).

Another conclusion from the universal matrix is Lévi-Strauss’s strong oppo-sition to the idea of primitive thought. According to him, the logic of mythicalthought and that of Western positive thought do not really differ in the quality oftheir mental operations, but only as to the nature of their object of investigation.Thus, there are two opposed modes of scientific thought, which are a function ofthe two strategic levels from which the physical world is approached: the oneapproach, utterly concrete, adjusted to perception and imagination and veryclose to intuition, is focused on sensible qualities, while the other, utterlyabstract and not so close to intuition, is focused on formal properties.

These two modes of thought are not due to unequal stages of the develop-ment of the human mind and knowledge; they are equally valid, and “savage”thought is logical and of the same nature with our own logic. Given thisposition, we understand why Lévi-Strauss believes that the idea of progress


cannot be considered as a universal category of human development. For him,there has been progress only in humanity’s products (not in thought), which,however, has not been continuous and presents changes in its orientation.Progress is a category of our own society and is subjectively determined.

Lévi-Strauss believes that his structural true history conceives of what thehistorian’s history is by definition unable to conceive: the equality betweenWestern culture and other cultures. He believes that the result of Western historyis to attribute to the Papuans, for example, the metaphysical function of the“Other,” a perspective satisfying a philosophical appetite that turns into anintellectual cannibalism worse than the actual one. Ethnocentrism cannotaccept as natural the diversity of cultures, but considers it as a monstrosity(Lévi-Strauss 1958: 254–255, 368, 1962: 5, 21, 24, 32–33, 341, 354–357 and1961: 19, 36, 38, 68).

Finally, the universal matrix lies behind a major philosophical reversal.Lévi-Strauss states that the aim of the social sciences is the dissolution ofman. We understand that this dissolution is due to a double regression, thefirst from the “I” of an individual or a culture to the “us-matrix” of humanity,and the second from “us” to biology/nature. This continuous and overambitiousregression, which aims also to cover animal psychology, ends, for Lévi-Strauss,with the integration of life within its physico-chemical origins (Lévi-Strauss 1962:326–328, 347).

The set of Levi-Straussian ideas that we have presented above was inte-grated into the very core of what later was called poststructuralism. Even hisuniversal matrix, which at first glance does not seem to have any connectionwith poststructuralism, lies behind reinterpretations that I shall discuss below.

Both Lévi-Strauss and Saussure had a profound influence on individualpoststructuralist authors. I shall start with Saussure’s influence on JacquesDerrida. The cornerstone of Derrida’s philosophy is the concept of “value,”which Saussure relates to the arbitrariness of the sign. Value is for Saussurethe foundation of langue, the social and systemic part of language, which hecontrasts to its use, parole. The “first principle” in respect to langue is itsarbitrariness, its conventionality, the lack of motivation with reference to therelationship between signifier and signified, but also between signs and thethings in the world. The arbitrariness of the sign follows for Saussure fromvalue, the real dynamics behind the sign. While the signified is positivelydefined as a content corresponding to a signifier, value is negatively definedas the relationships between (each plane of) a sign and the other signs of langue.The specific position of a sign in langue is only an abstract node in a networkof relations. Thus, value is purely differential in nature, a quality which iscorrelative with arbitrariness, and langue consists only of differences. Value is


a hierarchically superior concept to that of signified, because significationcannot exist without it. Value, as a relational concept, shows for Saussure thesolidarity between the terms of langue, which is a system, indeed a social systemconsisting of signs or, better, of pure values (Saussure 1971 [1916]: 25, 30–31,100–101, 116, 158–160, 163).5 Here, I would like to point out another radicalepistemological clash between Peirce and Saussure: while for Peirce the signfollows the traditional conception of representation, for Saussure representationand reference are abolished and the sign is given a radical relational anddifferential nature.

Derrida finds that the thesis of the arbitrariness of the sign, for which heprefers the term “non-motivation,” is fundamental, but he gives priority to thecorrelative thesis of difference as the source of value (Derrida 1967b: for exam-ple, 65–77). Due to the system of differences, no linguistic entity is in realitypresent as such, but relates to other entities, which are equally not present (thedefinition of value), and any assumed “center” or “central” signified whichcould be considered as original, positive, and transcendental is impossible,with as a result an extension ad infinitum of the freeplay of the substitutionsof signification. The same conception is applied by Derrida at the macro-level ofwhole texts: there is no positive signification in a text, because the text isdifferent from itself before it even exists (Derrida 1967a: for example, 42, 423,1967b: for example, 73 and 1972: for example, 16–18, 37–38, 45–46, 78).According to Derrida, the differential effects in the semiotic systems are the“product” of the structurality of structure, différance. In order to avoid thelanguage of metaphysics, Derrida states that it has no absolute origin, nopositive existence, and cannot take the form of a presence, be described byany metaphysical concept or be the object of a science (Derrida 1972: forexample, 16–18, 38–39, 78 n. 22 and 1967a: 83, 90–92, 95).

Derrida is also close to Levi-Straussian structuralism, but he is simulta-neously strongly critical of it. He believes that the ultrastructuralism of Lévi-Strauss by focusing on structure rejects the most valuable and original intentionof structuralism. The structure presupposes a present “center” – and the centerhaunts the Western history of metaphysics – only the existence of whichstabilizes it. Structuralism is teleological, because it believes that meaning existsexclusively within the structure. Further, structuralism is essentialist and meta-physical, because it considers structure as real, as being in the object, and thus

5 This system is a state of langue existing in synchrony and studied by static or synchroniclinguistics, as opposed to diachronic linguistics, which studies relations in time betweenindividual successive terms, of which the one replaces the other.


as presence, a view Derrida calls “structural realism.” The structures ofultrastructuralism are static, while what is produced by différance is ruled bysystematic transformations attached to differences (Derrida 1967a: for example,27–28, 43–44 and 1972: for example, 39). In this manner, Derrida proposesessentially a structuralism without structures. While the Levi-Straussian matrixis anchored in a “center” (the laws of the unconscious, the functioning of thebrain), Derrida wants his own matrix of differences to have no origin. However,he believes that the center is a necessary function, with the aim of organizing astructure and limiting its freeplay. As we can see, for him, the structures ofstructuralism are not wrong, but the product of the ossification of meaning(Derrida 1967a: for example, 13–14, 27–28, 36, 41–44, 409–411).

The reality of freeplay disrupts presence and being, and generally all “cen-ters” of Western thought. The subject, being one of these centers, is also derivedfrom the semiotic movement of différance and there is no presence of the subjectin itself outside and before that movement. It is thus not true, for Derrida, thatthe semiotic codes emanate from the subject, but on the contrary the subject isconstructed through the semiotic system. Différance excludes the search fortruth and leads us beyond the subject, man, and humanism (Derrida 1967b:for example, 37 and 1972: for example, 27, 39–41, 48).

The combination of the views of Derrida – without any reference to him – withthe post-May-’68 climate in Paris, which I shall discuss below, marks Jean-FrançoisLyotard’s La condition postmoderne (1979). Lyotard dismisses the legitimating“grand narratives” of modernism, such as the Hegelian dialectics of the Spiritand the Marxist emancipation of humanity – without abandoning the politicalLeft – as unable to validate postmodern scientific discourse. This is anotherway of defending the abolition of a center. Having recourse to Wittgenstein andhis language games, he states that science in postmodernity plays its own gameand cannot legitimize other games, because it cannot in the first place legitimizeitself; each game has its own rules and the games are “heteromorphic” comparedto each other. Thus, scientific knowledge is just one type of discourse and thereis no metadiscourse of knowledge, no universal metalanguage, there are no com-mon meta-prescriptions, not even for the sciences (Lyotard 1979: 11, 32, 63, 66–68,98, 104–107).

Lyotard opts for an anti-model to the grand stable system, an anti-modelwhich for him corresponds to the actual pragmatics of science. It is an “opensystem,” where a “differentiating” (différenciante) activity is at work, accordingto which a meta-prescriptive discourse generates new discourses and rules of thegames. This concept is manifestly an empirical use of différance, and Lyotard,once more like Derrida, rejects structure, but not the system (of differences), towhich, as a social system, he states no pure alternative can be found. Contrary to


the “grand narratives,” postmodern science operates with local “small narra-tives” (Lyotard 1979: 25–27, 28 n. 46, 29, 99, 103–105, 107).

The combined influence of Saussure and Lévi-Strauss also lies behind themature form of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis. On the occasion of a lectureLacan gave in 1946, we learn that he had just read Saussure, to whom he wasintroduced by Lévi-Strauss (Roudinesco 1990 [1984]: 144, 175). The post-warLacan adopted linguistics as a pilot science – as opposed, for him, to ahypothetically generalized semiology – and starts from the concepts of thesignifier (S) and the signified (s). His conception of their relation, however,amounts to a capital distortion of a major point of Saussure’s theory, theinseparable tie between the two aspects of the sign. Lacan presents their rela-tionship as an “algorithm,” with the form S/s and this concept of algorithmimplies a process by stages, that is, S → s. The signifier is the “superior” term, thesignified the “inferior” and the bar resists signification. According to Lacan, thesignifier does not represent the signified and has a signification of its own,“meaning.” The bar makes possible the study of the relationships between thesignifiers themselves (Lacan 1966: 496–501).

The role of Saussurean linguistics in Lacan’s theory is generally recognized,but this is not the case with the influence of Lévi-Strauss, which is not generallynoticed in the bibliography. Lévi-Strauss offers Lacan a guide in order to give amathematical expression to what he considers to be the relationships betweensignifiers. He starts with a pair of binary oppositions + /–, which corresponds forhim to the fundamental alternative between presence and absence. Next, heconstructs triadic groups with all possible combinations between these mathe-matical notations, these first two operations being taken explicitly from Lévi-Strauss. Lacan classifies these groups according to their formal characteristicsinto three classes He applies these classes to a random series composed of theinitial notations and proceeds to a superior level of classes on the basis of acombination by twos of the previous classes, arriving at four superior classes.Finally, he turns to the syntax of the succession of the latter. Lacan believes thathe has achieved the elementary formalization of exchange, which presents ananthropological interest. This is Lacan’s universal matrix à la Lévi-Strauss andthe model for his chaîne signifiante, the foundation of his theory (Lacan 1966:47–50, 501–502). For him, only signifiers are structured, their structure resultingfrom their combinations, and due to the latter they have meaning. The whole ofthe symbolic order ruling the signifiers depends on the ultimate signifier ofdesire, beyond consciousness, which is the “Phallus,” a paternal metaphor.The structure of the signifiers, their syntax, produces effects within experienceand is constitutive of the subject. Lacan relates this conclusion to structuralismin general, on the grounds that the latter conceives of experience as the field


where “it speaks” (Lacan 1966: for example, 30, 50, 94, 98, 229, 268, 278, 413–414, 628, 649, 655–656).

What Lacan wants to show with this mathematical exercise is that a succes-sion of random phenomena is ruled by strict symbolic determinations, in orderto conclude that the theory and practice of free association in psychoanalysis ismeaningful due to the autonomy of the symbolic; the power of psychoanalysis isto have recourse to this symbolic determination and its laws. These are the lawsof what is above the bar, the laws of the unconscious, which are the same asthose of natural languages and, just as for Lévi-Strauss, universal (Lacan 1966:for example, 47–52, 59–61, 276–277, 285, 594).

Michel Foucault, in the first form of his history – or “archaeology” – of thesciences and of knowledge in general, uses épistémè as his central concept. Hedefines épistémè as an unconscious epistemological “order,” a “grid,” a systemof rules, corresponding to a specific historical period, which embodies thepreconditions of knowledge in this period. These preconditions delimit a certaindomain of knowledge within experience, set the context in which may evolve adiscourse considered as true, impose a mode of being for the objects of knowl-edge constituting the above domain and offer a mode of organization for theconcepts used. The systems of épistémè are subject to sudden historical trans-formations and are thus discontinuous, with as a result the exclusion of anycontinuous progress in the knowledge of what is considered as truth at anyparticular time (Foucault 1966: 11–14, 170–171, 384–385). The reasons for thesehistorical transformations remain unaccounted for by Foucault.

According to Foucault, then, a supra-individual, unconscious but culture-specific “grid” presides over human thought. It is evident that there is a closeconnection between the concept of épistémè and the matrix of Lévi-Strauss, aswell as the laws of the unconscious of Lacan, with the important difference thatFoucault historicizes both concepts. In all cases, however, the subject is elimi-nated. One more similarity with Lévi-Strauss is the lack of progress in respect tothought systems.

Starting at the end of the 1960s, Foucault retreated one more step from theLevi-Straussian matrix, though without losing contact with it. There is now nolonger one general system of knowledge in each historical period, but a pluralityof discourses of knowledge. These discourses are given a processual character,because Foucault considers them as practices, which is a Marxist concept. Aswith épistémè, the discourses-practices are subject to internal rules, the “rules offormation” of the discourse or practice, and discourses are discontinuous witheach other. The relationships between these discontinuous discourses leadFoucault to two major conclusions. First, the subject, being the node of thesediscourses, explodes in a plurality of positions; and second, there is the need to


elaborate, outside the philosophies of the subject, a theory of “discontinuoussystematicities,” which I believe we may consider as a new form of the épistémè.Now, the “order of orders” takes the historicized form of the “series of series”ruling the discursive formations. In respect to the referent of these discourses,Foucault once more follows Lévi-Strauss in insisting on the subjectivity of thehistorical fact. The positivist objective “fact” is replaced by Foucault with asemiotic entity, the “discursive event,” with the rationale that discourse absorbsreality (Foucault 1971: 54–62). We may conclude that any kind of history turnsout to be purely a semiotic history.

Foucault’s cultural theory passed through four different stages and duringthe last two stages he distanced himself, as will become clear later, from theLevi-Straussian influence; evolving through these stages, Foucault acquired agreater originality of his own, though he never abandoned the Levi-Straussiansemiotic foundation of history.

The discussion above emphasized the strong continuities between structural-ism and poststructuralism, but there have also been external influences on thelatter, which brought with them a remarkable discontinuity. Historically andgeographically, both structuralism and poststructuralism emerged in the Paris ofthe 1960s. According to Manfred Frank, poststructuralism represents an opposi-tion to mainstream philosophy and literature. It combined classical structuralism(the continuity) with a reinterpretation of German philosophy (the discontinuity),which became an instrument for the subversion of structuralism. Frank arguesthat poststructuralism revives the old German anti-modernist and anti-Enlightenment romanticism. It resumes the German critique of metaphysics fromromanticism to Heidegger and proclaims the death of metaphysics and of anysupreme and legitimating value, seeing this as part of the postmodern condition.The list of German philosophers is not short and preeminent on it figuresNietzsche with his anti-positivism and Heidegger with his phenomenology, him-self connected to both Nietzsche and the idealism of Hegel, another major figureon the list. Frank also expands the list in two other directions, pointed out alreadyby Lévi-Strauss: first towards psychoanalysis and secondly towards Marxism,mainly the idealistically tinged Frankfurt School. On the whole, the oppositionbetween structuralism and poststructuralism is an opposition between a scientificand positivist orientation and a philosophical and interpretative orientation(for the above discussion concerning poststructuralism, see Frank 1989 [1984]:7–30). Thus, Frank is right in concluding that essentially poststructuralism is moreof a philosophical movement than an approach to the human sciences – however,and at first sight amazingly, postmodernism came to invade this domain, and notonly. Finally, there are also certain other very important influences, with whichI shall deal later on.


I would consider as the central theoretical opposition between structuralism andpoststructuralism in Saussurean terms that between langue and parole. A veryinteresting sociological explanation of the impressive diffusion of Saussure’s theoryin the West is offered by Roy Harris. Referring to the period after World War I, Harrisargues that the concept of langue responded well to the post-war anxieties of asocially, politically, and economically unstableWest, because Saussure’s synchroniclinguistics was at that time a suitable tool for challenging pre-existing values,forgetting the past, and creating contemporary values. Thus, it is reasonable, accord-ing to Harris, that Western societies were ready not only to adopt this concept, butalso to extrapolate it from linguistics to all discussion concerning the individual andsociety. In the post-war period, Harris argues, the diffusion of Saussurean ideas waseven wider, with as a result that the structuralist explanation of culture occupiedoncemore the center of scientific interest. He adds, however, that this time it came tobe seen with skepticism, because the new war had erased the hope invested insynchronic constructions, which thus became the target of the critique of the post-structuralists (Harris 2001: 194–196, 200, 205–206). I cannot agree with his explana-tion of the post-war period, because structuralism dominated for more than twowhole decades after the war and only then did poststructuralism emerge as domi-nant. Poststructuralismwas to an important degree the product of amajor event, but,as I will argue, this was not the trauma from the war, but the social unrest of May1968. This was a turning point for the rejection of langue, the dangerous staticstructural system, in favor of parole, the supposed unbounded, “free” communica-tion in conjunctural situations. This theoretical opposition was accompanied by anepistemological opposition: the rejection of the scientific attitude of structuralism as“scientificity” and the adoption of a science-hostile hermeneutic approach.

Similarities and dissimilarities both connect and disconnect structuralism andpoststructuralism. Which in the final balance weighs heaviest? Frank concludesthat poststructuralism is in reality a “neostructuralism,” and I believe that thepreceding account leads to the same conclusion: there may be a marked disconti-nuity between them, but it is a discontinuity in continuity, resulting in the trans-formation of structuralism and the production of new variants of it. In respect to theresearch object, the research object of both approaches is comparable (Table 1).

5 The articulation between Marxismand Saussurean semiotics

As I already stated, Marxism exerted a strong influence on poststructuralism,and an understanding of poststructuralism would be incomplete without a


discussion of this influence. In fact, the influence of Marxism did not suddenlyappeared with poststructuralism but has a prehistory with classical Saussureansemiotics, for which it played a notable role and from which it is thus reasonableto start. One more reason for discussing this influence is that it is systematicallyignored by semioticians.6

The influence of Marxism on structuralism/semiotics started as early as the1920s with the work of Pavel Nikolaevich Medvedev and Mikhail M. Bakhtin.While these authors as Marxists were critical of semiotics, their attitude was notone of dismissal; instead, they were the first to propose an articulation ofsemiotics with and within Marxist social theory. Culture here is seen as theproduct of ideology and all cultural products, as “semiotic material,” are con-sidered to be meaningful, but also material things. For Bakhtin and Medvedev,the world of meaning is constituted in social communication and the “objects-signs,” in which ideology is incorporated and which are the externalized andmaterialized social consciousness of a collectivity, form the “ideological envir-onment” of this collectivity. Each ideological sphere is determined by, but alsodetermines, this ideological environment, “while only obliquely reflecting andrefracting socioeconomic and natural existence” (Medvedev and Bakhtin 1978[1928]: 7–15). The result of this encounter between semiotics and Marxism is theorganic integration of the former within the latter (Table 2). A similar approachlies behind the much later work of Pierre Bourdieu.

Without such an elaborated theoretical rationale, Roland Barthes in hisearly work made the same connection between society and the semiotics ofideology. According to Barthes, the status of the bourgeois class is historicallyparticular, attached to a specific system of property, and founded on technicaland scientific progress. The function of bourgeois ideology is similar to that ofmyth, which is a parole, indeed a depoliticized parole. Its aim is to immobilizethe world. The fundamental operation of this ideology is the transformation ofthe products of history into eternal universal essences (i. e., history into nature)and the maintenance of the inalterable hierarchy of the world. This immobile

6 I can give two instances of this fact from my personal experience. Before the 1979 WorldCongress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies in Vienna, the HungarianAssociation for Semiotic Studies held its national conference in Budapest. On this occasioncertain scholars, including the present author, were invited to Budapest, with the aim ofexchanging views on the contents of a dictionary of semiotics, on the initiative of Thomas G.and Irene Portis Winner and with the presence of Thomas A. Sebeok. I proposed an entry onMarxism and semiotics, without any positive result. Finally, the Encyclopedic Dictionary ofSemiotics was published by Sebeok himself in 1986. I had no better luck when I made thesame proposal to the editors of the Semiotik/Semiotics handbook, published 12 years later.


world lives within the bourgeoisie and does not allow it to change the world.Due to it, the bourgeoisie cannot imagine the Other, whom it opts to deny,ignore or identify with itself. In order to digest the “Negro” or the Russian, thebourgeoisie has recourse to exoticism and transforms the Other into spectacle,pushing him/her out to the limits of humanity (an issue on which Barthes andLévi-Strauss agree). Barthes opposes to this kind of language the revolutionaryparole, which, for him, is plainly political and does not contemplate the worldbut makes it; revolution abolishes the myth (Barthes 1957: 9, 193–195, 224–225,234, 239–244).

The ideas of Medvedev and Bakhtin were rediscovered 40 years later byLouis Althusser’s structural, Levi-Straussian Marxism. Althusser, reading Marxstructurally, argues that society is constituted by three major “instances”: theeconomic, the legal and political, and that of ideologies and theoretical forma-tions (philosophy and sciences). Each instance is internally structured andrelatively autonomous, and their interrelations create a structured complexwhole, which is determined in the last instance by the economic level(Althusser and Balibar 1968: 120–125). Important authors were nurtured by thistradition, among them Althusser’s students, the anthropologist Maurice Godelierand the sociologist Nicos Poulantzas. Structural Marxism imposed on Marxismthe static structuralist logic, thus integrating it, while however retaining majoraspects of Marxism (Table 2).

The transformation of Marxism by semiotics is much more advanced in thecase of Lévi-Strauss. He starts by stating that the universal logic he identifieswas suggested to him by the convergence between Freudian psychoanalysis,geology, and Marxism,7 three areas that he believes offer the framework forthe location of ethnography. Their meeting point is that they integrate empiricalphenomena into rational thinking and reduce the sensible, appearances, toanother (deeper) kind of reality, which is rational, leading to a kind of “super-rationalism” (Lévi-Strauss 1955: 57–62).

In this context, Lévi-Strauss states that he was introduced to Marx at the ageof seventeen and that he rarely clarifies a sociological or anthropological pro-blem without having recourse to his writings. The reason is, he explains, that welearn from Marx that social science is built on events but then is in need ofmodel building. I already made reference to Lévi-Strauss’s orders. Inspired byMarxist theory, he classifies them into two categories. The first includes the“infrastructural,” “lived” orders, such as the kinship system and social organi-zation, which belong to an objective reality and can be studied from the outside

7 To which we should of course add structural phonology.


and controlled experimentally, independently of the manner in which theyare conceived by individuals. The second category is that of the mental, “super-structural,” “conceived” orders, such as mythology and religion (and art andcooking), which do not correspond directly to objective reality (Lévi-Strauss1958: 347–348). This theoretical approach poses a major epistemological pro-blem from the Marxist point of view, because Lévi-Strauss’s infrastructuralorders are seen as pure semiotic systems, while for Marxism the foundationalprocesses in society are not semiotic but material processes. This sociologicalreversal, according to which the whole of society is absorbed into the semiotic,became the hallmark of poststructuralism.

We find an interesting example of the influence of Marxism on semiotics in thefoundations of Eco’s semiotic theory, but in order to clarify it we must go back toFerruccio Rossi-Landi. Rossi-Landi applies Marxism directly to semiotic theory andconsiders linguistic objects, such as words and messages, as created by a collectiveform of work, linguistic work; he sees them as homologous with physical products,i. e., material artefacts, the products of transformative work. Linguistic productiveactivity is one aspect of human work. Carrying this analogy further, Rossi-Landiobserves that linguistic products like material products have a use value or utilityand an exchange value. The first form of value is due to the fact that they satisfy thebasic needs of communication, while the second form follows from the existence oftheir interrelationships, as well as from their transmission and reception within alinguistic market. Language, like money, constitutes a constant capital, accompa-nied by the variable capital of the linguistic labor power expended by its users(Rossi-Landi 1983). This kind of approach belongs typologically to the integration ofsemiotics into Marxism (Table 2).

A trace of Rossi-Landi’s approach can be found in the work of Eco. In hisA Theory of Semiotics, Eco counter-proposes to the traditional division of semio-tics into syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics a division into a theory of codes(semiotics of signification) and a theory of sign production (semiotics of com-munication). Both the acts of signifying and communicating are social functions.He states that both the production and the reception of an utterance, linguisticor other, presuppose different forms of labor. These kinds of labor are social(Eco 1976: 3–4, 29, 151–156) – Table 2.

6 The influence of Marxism on poststructuralism

As I mentioned above, Frank identifies as external influences on poststructural-ism German philosophy, psychoanalysis, and Marxism, mainly that of the


Frankfurt School. I shall now try to further elaborate on and extend this group ofinfluences, a task that cannot be fully understood without reference to theevents of May 1968. Poststructuralism had begun to emerge a few years beforethe May 1968 uprising, but it was May 1968 that shook the French (mainlyParisian) intellectuals and with its social, political, and cultural turmoil playeda catalytic role in its formation. The slogans and graffiti of May 1968, an activeforce of the uprising, combine surrealism and psychoanalysis to demonstrate adesire to surpass the divisions between reality and phantasy, the rational andthe irrational, and to conquer lived experience. A central role in both theuprising and the graffiti was played by the Situationist International, a Leftistmovement akin to surrealism whose leading figure was Guy-Ernest Debord. Thiscomplex mixture had a decisive impact on the major poststructuralist authors,though this does not imply that they had not been exposed before May 1968 tosome of the above currents.

According to Debord, commodity relations, that is, alienated social rela-tions, have penetrated and mastered the whole of everyday life, culture, art,leisure, even personal behavior; every domain of life has been transformed intoa commodity. This is what Debord calls the “spectacle,” a social relationshipmediated by images and created by the existing mode of production. Ways of lifeare sold in the marketplace as lifestyles. The consumer cannot find identity inanything except identification with the commodity and pointless consumption.Revolutionary criticism and class struggle will turn against these alienatedsocial relations and the deep impoverishment of everyday life. The situationistaction will take the form of a new kind of play, coextensive with everyday life.The post-revolutionary, post-capitalist society, like the one envisaged by dada-ism and surrealism, aims at a new totality of social relations. It will be char-acterized by the abolition of work, the unification of art, politics, and scientificdisciplines, and the achievement of a playful life, which will involve pleasure,uncommodified leisure, and the satisfaction of desires (Debord 1992 [1967]).

While the number of Situationists in the streets of Paris was extremelylimited, their graffiti and Debord’s ideas played a crucial role. Surrealism cameout of the galleries and was acted out in the streets. Psychoanalysts turned toradical social criticism and joined the political Left, psychoanalysis acquired acentral position in it and Lacan, who had not previously notably inclined tothe Left, came to be seen, perhaps with some help on his part, as a politicalradical. Preaching the primacy of desire, he became the leader of a Leftist“French Freud revolution,” the ideas of which were widely diffused in Frenchculture and science. From May 1968 on, Lacanian psychoanalysis and surre-alism, very close to situationism, were strongly connected in France (Turkle1992: 6, 8, 10–11, 47, 49, 65, 68, 84–86; Plant 1992: 104).


Robert Wicks, receding further back in time than May 1968, argues that dada-ism and surrealism had a strong impact, still underappreciated, on French philo-sophy and the whole of French thought in the twentieth century. He also points outthe influence of the anti-establishment attitude of the Dadaists on Gilles Deleuzeand Félix Guattari, Derrida, Foucault, and the later work of Barthes; and of thesurrealist views concerning the artificiality, fragility, and changeability of norms insociety on the three latter. To these two sources of influence on poststructuralism,Wicks adds a third influence, existentialism, which he sees as being transformed byits contact with Saussurean linguistics. According to him, existentialism is behindthe views on the multi-dimensionality of language and the endless deployment ofmeaning held by Lacan, Derrida, Barthes, and Lyotard and its influence was suchthat they may be considered as “linguo-existentialists” (Wicks 2003: ix-x, 11, 14–16,295–296, 298). I note here that Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, together with JuliaKristeva and others, were close to the journal Tel Quel, a Left-wing literarymagazinewhich broke with the Parti Communiste Français (PCF) in 1971 to adopt Maoism,from which it distanced itself in 1976.

An interesting example of a pre-May 1968 connection to surrealism is givenby Lacan. In the thirties, during his passage from psychiatry to psychoanalysis,Lacan met Salvador Dali, who was then involved in the highly Freudian surre-alist movement. Both Lacan and Dali were interested in paranoia, in particularin the process through which a paranoid person assigns meaning to reality.Dali’s “paranoid-critical theory of interpretation,” closely related to his paint-ings, asserts the intrusion of the unconscious in the field of visual representa-tion. He believes that the unconscious uses the objects in the world in order toinvest them with its own content, mediating in this manner the representation ofreality; the unconscious assigns meaning to form (the signifier).

Dali’s influence on Lacan, in addition to the general cultural context of thethirties, led Lacan, who was studying the paranoiac delirium, to explore thefunction of the unconscious in the field of the representation of reality. On theother hand, Dali had recourse to Lacan’s views in order to argue that hisparanoid-critical method of interpretation is an active method of artistic crea-tion. Lacan, who was studying the paranoiac delirium, like Dali, gave centralimportance to the role of form as such in the process by which the unconsciousassigns meaning to the objects of perception. This focus on form was crucial forLacan’s re(mis)interpretation of Saussure and his apotheosis of the signifier,which marks his “return to Freud” and the whole of his psychoanalytic theory(Constantinidou 2012).

We may now understand that Saussure, and Lévi-Strauss, offered Lacan theinstruments to formalize and deepen his pre-war surrealist ideas. This is a non-Marxist surrealism, in the climate of its first stage, when it revolved around


psychoanalysis, before the forceful entry of Marxism in the late 1930s. It is thissecond aspect of surrealism that had a strong presence in May 1968, contribut-ing to baptize Lacan as belonging to the political left.

While deconstruction seems to be the antipode of Marxism, Derrida finallycame to take position on this issue with his Spectres de Marx (1993). Derrida wasaffiliated with the Left and participated in the demonstrations of May 1968. Hecombines a reverence for Marx’s thought with a determined attack on thediscourses – which he rightly considers as aiming at imposing a world hege-mony and tending to become dominant on the geopolitical stage – celebratingthe death of Marx and Marxism and extolling capitalism, the economy of themarket, neo-liberalism, and liberal democracy. He mentions the existence ofdifferent “spirits” of Marxism and states that he adopts one of them, which is notaligned with Marxist orthodoxy. He believes that Marxism needs to be radicallychanged, something which for him is in agreement with the Marxist spirit. ForDerrida, who wants to be a “good Marxist” (his quotation marks), deconstruc-tion would be impossible without Marxism and is faithful to it as a radicalcritique, a stance that is a heritage from the Enlightenment but is also aradicalization of Marxism, a critical discourse on the critique and ontology ofMarxism without sacrificing its emancipatory promise (Derrida 1993: for exam-ple, 36, 90, 95–96, 101–102, 142, 145, 148–153, 269). This strikes me as tooabstract a relation between deconstruction and Marxism, which is why I believeit is wiser to stay with the conclusion of Christopher Norris that “it is difficult tosquare deconstruction in this radical, Nietzschean guise with any workableMarxist account of text and ideology. Such attempted fusions in the name of aMarxian poststructuralist theory are fated … to an endlessly proliferating dis-course of abstraction” (Norris 1982: 80, 83–85).

Barthes was a socialist, but a critical one. In literary theory we may speakabout two polarized Barthes, on the one hand Barthes the classical semioticianof the 1950s and 1960s, and on the other the dedicated poststructuralist of the1970s. Already in 1971, Barthes referred dismissively to his own early work,confessing that it only represents “a euphoric dream of scientificity” and reject-ing the possibility of a scientific semiotics. His differentiation between thesupposed passive “readerly” (lisible) texts of classical literature and postmodern“writerly” (scriptible) texts is well known. The readerly texts follow a representa-tional model and condemn the reader to passivity and seriousness. The writerlytexts, literature as labor, created by productive “writing,” empty out the mean-ing of the text and transform it into a constellation of signifiers, not a structureof signifieds. They thus transform the readers from simple consumers to activeproducers of the text and allow them to play with the text and have full access tothe magic of the signifiers and the pleasure offered by them, a playing which is


also a form of writing as linguistic labor (Barthes 1970: 9–10, 17). We recognizein these brief positions a complex node of influences: the Marxist concept oflabor, the central situationist concept of play, the Lacanian signifier and theDerridian freeplay of signification.

On the author, Barthes adopts both a sociological and a semiotic point ofview. In the context of the first, he argues that in literature the author asindividuality is a correlative of positivism, the latter representing the culmina-tion of capitalist ideology. From the semiotic viewpoint, the existence of theauthor provides a final signified (Derrida’s center) that limits the text and closesthe proliferation of meaning. But the identity of the author (as authority andFather – Barthes 1970: 217) is destroyed by the practice of writing. The authorturns into a simple function of the text, not a producer antecedent to it, andbecomes a “scriptor,” producing a set of “traces” rather than expressing aninteriority. By this practice the author disappears as the origin of the text andfinds his/her own death (Barthes 1970: 9–14, 17, 146–149). Now, the death of thesubject is joined by the death of the author.

Barthes agrees with the views on language of Stéphane Mallarmé, the down-grading of the author and the centrality of automatic writing of the Surrealists(Barthes 1988: 147–148). He identifies the pleasure of a text with “drifting”(dérive – Barthes 1973: 32–33), which is a surrealist and situationist term thatfor the Situationists indicates a psycho-geographical wandering in urban space,subverting the city of pure visuality and disrupting the banality of the everyday.What remains unchanged is his position with the political Left, which howevertakes different forms in the two stages of his life. In his first stage he attacksbourgeois ideology, “the bourgeois Norm,” which is for him “the capital enemy”(Barthes 1957: 7, 9, 236–244). In a Derridean movement of his second stage, hewrites that “writing” does not seek any ultimate meaning of the text or of “the worldas text” (cf. objectivity and subjectivity “sont des imaginaires” [‘are imaginary’] –Barthes 1970: 17), a viewpoint that he considers anti-theological and revolutionary,because “to refuse to fix meanings is... to refuse God and his hypostases – reason,science, law” (Barthes 1988). This is a long way from the early Barthes, who knewthat, beyond the level of discourse, there is the world of social praxis!

The revolutionary situationist views, in combination with the approach to thecity championed by Henri Lefebvre – who belonged to a satellite “groupuscule” ofthe Situationist International (Ross 2002: 275; see also Plant 1992: 63–64) – alsoinspired the Utopie group, founded in 1967. One member of this group was JeanBaudrillard, who knew Debord personally. Baudrillard openly acknowledged hisdebt to situationism and his approach is related to the latter, mainly in its earlyform. Later, Baudrillard disagreed with the active political situationist positionsand totally inverted the final aims of situationism, though he never abandoned


their common perspective on capitalism (Plant 1992: for example, 5, 35–37, 107,111–112, 115, 117, 118, 121–122, 137 164–166, 172; Sadler 1998: 47, 66, 176 n. 101). Thekey concept that Baudrillard came to use later, simulacrum, is meant to describethe main characteristic of our era, which is to generate reality through models ofreality, transforming it thus into the hyperreal (Baudrillard 1981: for example, 10–11). This hyperrealism of the simulacrum is a description of culture matching thesurrealist credo (Wicks 2003: 15).

There were foretastes of May 1968. The student unrest started earlier, inNovember 1966 at the University of Strasbourg, with the direct involvement ofthe Situationists. In January 1968 a second student’s movement took shape atthe University of Nanterre, where a preeminent part was played by the group ofthe Enragés that was politically close to the Situationists. In March 1968 a newmovement emerged at the same university, the Mouvement du 22 Mars, and twoperson involved in it were Lyotard and Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Lyotard wasaffiliated with the PCF and strongly criticized by its partisans when he left it.He was also a member of the Socialisme ou Barbarie group – with ideas close tothose of the Frankfurt School – which Debord joined in 1959, only to abandon itabout two years later, having however adopted a great deal of its political theory(Plant 1992: 5, 14–15, 96; Ford 2005: 113, 117–11).

I have already made reference to Lyotard’s dismissal of meta-prescriptions,i. e., grand narratives. He makes a furious attack against social systems theory,the “ideology of the ‘system’,” and its performance criterion. He identifies thisideology with technocracy as a totalizing tendency, cynicism, and terrorism, theterrorism that attempt to impose “isomorphy” on “heteromorphic” languagegames.

Lyotard argues that the referent (“reality”) is a function of the process ofproof and that this process is the ascertainment of a fact. Today, technology haspenetrated the management of proof, but technology is a game whose aim is nottruth, but performativity and efficiency. Ultimately, capitalism controls researchthrough power and power through technology controls “reality” (Lyotard 1979:72–78). Sadie Plant points to the impact that May 1968 had on the views ofLyotard (as well as Deleuze and Guattari). She refers to Lyotard’s encomium ofthe avant-garde and argues that his attack against theory – and his economy ofdesire, as well as Deleuze’s and Guattari’s philosophies of desire – are ofsituationist origin. She also attributes to May 1968 the origin of Foucault’sproblematics of power, to which I shall turn immediately below (Plant 1992:for example, 107–108, 111–112, 115–118, 121–122).

Since his youth, Foucault oscillated between phenomenology and aMarxism along the lines of Georg Lukács, until, as he stated late in his career,he was able to trace his own course. Under the influence of Althusser, he


joined the PCF at the age of 24. He left the Party after about two years, butremained a left-wing militant to the end of his life (Gros 1996: 4, 7, 9; Merquior1985: 20, 99, 101, 116).

While the early stage of Foucault’s thought is characterized by the conceptof épistémè, underpinning and determining the horizons and limits of knowl-edge and truth for an entire culture, he later abandons this concept for thenotion of “discursive formations.” Here, culture is conceived as multifocal andultimately regulated by power, a conception derived from Marxism, but Foucaultis interested in micro-scale power, the “micro-physics” of power. With thisconcept of power Foucault does not intend to contest the importance of thestate apparatus, but to bring to the surface complementary and finer relations ofpower which, while they are not part of the state, “often sustain the state moreeffectively than its own institutions” and extend and intensify state power. Thus,he sees it as a limitation to identify power only with the state apparatus and toconsider state power as the only form of power of a dominant class, a simpli-fication he states is not found in Marx. This small-scale, diffused type of powerFoucault calls the “panoptic apparatus,” after Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon.”He uses it as the model of the small-scale power apparatuses or power machineswhich are the anonymous mechanics of power: the prison, the military base, thehospital, the school, the factory. This apparatus controls and disciplines thebody, a discipline which is a political technique of the body.

In this second stage of Foucault’s thought, power is the central factor forthe organization of the discourses of knowledge, the definition of truth,and, through them, the constitution of the subject. In his third stage (fromthe end of the 1970s), Foucault’s nuclear concept of power is replacedby “governmentality,” which represents the articulation between threefactors: forms of knowledge, power relations, and processes of “subjectiva-tion” (processes concerning subjectivity as a relation to one’s self), which arenow seen as incommensurable factors. Finally, in Foucault’s fourth stage,during the 1980s, his object becomes historical experience as the domain ofarticulation of the three factors above; the central position is now given to thesubject as an historical subject, auto-constituted through practices installing arelation to itself including the body (Foucault 1971: 12 and 1980: 71–73; Gros1996: 66–67, 73–74, 83–84, 90–97) – and thus the (historical) human subject isbrought back to life.

To conclude, most masters of poststructuralism were affiliated to the poli-tical left already before May 1968. In the events of May 1968, Marxism of theleftist kind, surrealism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis became mixed together.A further mixture with German romanticism, this whole articulated on structur-alism, had as a result the poststructuralist view that the referent is totally


opaque and inaccessible and any kind of knowledge purely and solely refers tothe semiotic domain. Material society – and I do not mean here an essence, but acultural construction – is ignored and revolutionary social acts are replaced byrevolutionary cultural products, whether they are products of knowledge, litera-ture or the arts. Still, a fundamental contradiction remains: though the referentis inaccessible, one major referent permeates poststructuralist discourse: capit-alism, whence a fundamental contradiction of poststructuralist thought. On thewhole, the fate of Marxism with poststructuralism was a copy of its fate withLévi-Strauss, i. e., it was absorbed into semiotics (Table 2), with the importantdifference however that it infused poststructuralism with Left-wing politicalthought of the kind that emerged in May 1968.

7 The relation between poststructuralismand postmodernism

We should keep separate in our minds cultural phenomena and cultural theories.Before becoming a cultural theory, postmodernism was a cultural phenomenon inthe domain of the arts that appeared much earlier than the corresponding theory.Andreas Huyssen, for example, considers that from the mid-1950s there was arebellion of a new generation of artists, soon joined by critics, against abstractexpressionism, serial music, and classical literary modernism, though this did notyet constituted a truly postmodernmovement. According to him, postmodernism asa phenomenon appeared in the late 1950s, when the adversary role of late highmodernismwas superseded, because the artists and critics alike had the feeling thatthey were living in a new situation fundamentally different from the preceding one.Huyssen observes that the term “postmodernism” appeared in North Americanliterary criticism in the late 1950s (there were some earlier uses of the term) andwas used emphatically in the sixties, but only from the early and mid-1970s was itextended to refer first to architecture and later to dance, theatre, painting, cinema,and music. Already in the 1970s, according to Huyssen, we encounter “a genuinelypost-modern and post-avant-garde culture” (Huyssen 1988 [1986]: 61, 161, 183–184,188–189, 190, 195–197).

A slow transmission of poststructuralism to the U.S. started after themid-1960s. However, the decisive moment was the use by Lyotard of the term“postmodern” in his La condition postmoderne (1979). This was of major impor-tance in provoking the theoretical encounter between local empirical Americanpostmodernism and highly theoretical French poststructuralism; Lyotard’s bookcame to legitimize the bond of postmodernism with poststructuralism. According


to Huyssen, in the late 1970s a theoretical discussion began the U.S. concerningthe interface between the local tradition of postmodernism and French poststruc-turalism as understood in the U.S.; he points out that it was frequently based onthe assumption that the avant-garde in theory must in some way be close to theliterary and artistic avant-garde (Huyssen 1988 [1986]: 171, 184, 206–207).

Postmodern theorizing emerged from the close analogies betweenAmerican postmodern culture and French poststructuralist theory, thus itrepresents the Americanised form of French poststructuralism. Unavoidably,however, poststructuralism was adapted and to a certain degree reinterpretedin the context of local cultural phenomena and habits of thought. The role ofthe latter for this transformation should be emphasized. The cultures andframes of thought in France on the one hand, and the U.S. and generally theAnglo-Saxon world on the other, are radically incompatible. The Cartesian anddeductive theoretical thinking of France has nothing in common with theempiricist and inductive Anglo-Saxon tradition. The issue of the difficulty ofunderstanding French thought in the U.S. is raised by Pamela Tytell when sheobserves with reference to Lacanian psychoanalysis that, with few exceptions,it is “the dominant ideology [in the U.S.] which blocks a real reading ofLacan”; she contrasts the different scientific points of reference in the twocountries: Freud versus Skinner, Adler, Reich, and Fromm; Lévi-Strauss versusMead and Goudenough (Tytell 1974: 80–81).

An illuminating account of this transformation as it relates to Derridiandeconstruction is given by Christopher Norris. He detects two different tenden-cies among American deconstructionists. The one, faithful to deconstruction, isexemplified by the literary critic Paul de Man, of European origin, who ismeticulous in the use of concepts and has recourse to systematic argumentation,not wanting deconstruction to lose its quality of close reading. Indeed, forNorris, de Man, while a consistent deconstructionist, invites us to go beyondthe skepticism of deconstruction and states that the continuous regression offurther and further deconstructions must finally arrive at a stabilizing point. Thismeasured approach is far from being accepted by the second tendency, decon-struction “on the wild side,” represented by Geoffrey Hartman (also of Europeanorigin) and Joseph Hillis Miller, both literary critics, who push deconstruction tothe limits of interpretative freedom.

According to Norris, Hartman’s project is a specifically American decon-struction, one that melds criticism with literature, pushing the critic to theextremes of self-indulgence. Hartman does not follow the rigorous aspect ofdeconstruction and merges impressionistically and rhetorically different philo-sophical traditions. For Miller also, the rhetoric of textuality professed bydeconstruction allows the overcoming of the distinction between criticism and


literature. For him, due to the unending proliferation of meaning, the critic hasno responsibility to limit the freeplay of imagination and language. As Norrisnotes, the American reception of deconstruction had a direct impact on Derridahimself. The rhetoric he uses in his rejoinder to John R. Searle is quite unlike hisusual rigorous rationality. This aspect of deconstruction follows the “uncanny”or “vertiginous mode,” which is not without continuity with its rigorous aspect,but is nevertheless more indirect and circumstantial. It is an aspect both createdby the American deconstructionists and mainly addressed to them. Here, thefreeplay of textual dissemination is the order of the day (Norris 1982: 15, 92–93,97–99, 105–106, 113–115, 127 and 1990: 158, 159).

Postmodernism, like poststructuralism, is radically against grand theories,something that does not prevent its theoreticians from having a clear idea of themain traits of their own theory. These were very well formulated by Ihab Hassan(1987: 167–173), who identifies what he calls a tentative set of traits of post-modern culture, namely, postmodern theorizing, literature, and art. Hassanbelieves that the overarching trait is “critical pluralism” and gives two lists oftraits, of which the first is as follows:(1) Indeterminacy. Indeterminacy includes ambiguities, ruptures, and displace-

ments, which “constitute our world” and occur in science, literary theory,and art (in this context, Hassan refers to Bakhtin and Barthes’s writerlytext).

(2) Fragmentation. This is one of the traits that lead to indeterminacy and isopposed to any kind of totalization or synthesis in respect to science,society or the poetic domain. It is related to paradox and the operationsof montage and collage (there is reference here to Lyotard).

(3) Decanonization. This goes against all conventions of authority and lan-guages of power, and decanonizes culture. Thus, it refuses grand narra-tives, adopting instead small narratives, espouses the idea of a series ofdeaths (of God, the Father, the author) and supports subverting tendencies,such as minority movements and the feminization of culture (once morethe reference is to Lyotard).

(4) Selflessness/depthlessness. This concerns the death of the subject, the latterbeing considered by poststructuralists, as Hassan reminds us, as a totaliz-ing principle. The subject is lost in the differences that make up the play oflanguage and this loss appears in depthless styles refusing interpretation(reference to Nietzsche).

(5) The unpresentable/unrepresentable. This is the negation of representation.Postmodern art is non-realist and literature contests its own modes ofrepresentation (reference to Julia Kristeva).


These are, according to Hassan, the deconstructive traits of postmodernism.He continues with the following traits, which he considers as reconstructive:(6) Irony. Due to the absence of a grand narrative, the search for truth is

continually postponed and the result is play and an ironic self-reflexivity,which assumes indeterminacy. This trait can be seen in literary criticism,philosophy, history (reference to Bakhtin and Derrida).

(7) Hybridization. This is the transformation and mixing of genres and styles,leading to new relations between historical elements or the mixing of highand low culture. It is accompanied by parody, pastiche, and kitsch, and itappears in literature, literary criticism, cinema, and architecture (refer-ence to Heidegger).

(8) Carnivalization. According to Hassan, this concept, borrowed fromBakhtin, addresses all the traits above (with the exception of the unpre-sentable) and implies performance, polyphony, absurdity, and the comic.

(9) Performance/participation. It results from the indeterminacy of the post-modern text, verbal or nonverbal, theoretical or artistic, and is the activeparticipation of the addressee (cf. Barthes).

(10) Constructionism. Due to its non-realistic nature, postmodernism constructsreality in fictions, a phenomenon traversing social relations, postmoderntheory, science, high technologies, and art (reference to poststructuralism).

(11) Immanence. This refers to the projection of language and signs, morespecifically signifiers, into nature, “turning nature into culture, and cul-ture into an immanent semiotic system,” and thus, for example, the hardsciences depend on the latter. This movement of immanence is the sourceof a reflexive irony, but in a consumer society it can lead to emptiness(reference to Baudrillard).

These traits, following more or less directly from poststructuralism, alsodirectly encounter the positions of Lévi-Strauss discussed above. I indicatedwith reference to poststructuralism its major contradiction of denying the pos-sibility of knowing reality, while simultaneously constantly referring to the veryreal phenomenon of capitalism, and this is also the case with postmodernism. Ofcourse, both the Poststructuralists and the Postmodernists are right in referringto this extra-semiotic material socio-economic factor, because sociologicallypostmodern society is indeed closely related to capitalism.

There are different explanations of the nature both of recent capitalism andpostmodern society. Thus, Zygmunt Bauman emphasizes the radical breakbetween modern and postmodern society, which is no longer organized aroundthe productive function, but is founded on individuals in a consumer market,


operating on the pleasure principle. Postmodern culture – the object and envir-onment of postmodern theorizing – is the surface symptom of this much deepersocial transformation. Bauman also states that, given the differences betweenthese two societies, a new rational sociology of postmodernity is necessary, asopposed to current postmodern sociology that is an intellectual genre in har-mony with postmodern culture (Bauman 1992: 42–53, 64–65, 187–188, 223).On the other hand, Fredric Jameson holds that postmodern society is not acompletely new type of social formation, an alleged “post-industrial” society,but just a new, “purer” stage of capitalism. According to Jameson, postmodernculture has a function in relation to the economic system of this late capitalismdifferent from the function of modern culture in the previous stage of capitalism;late capitalism has abolished the previous relative autonomy of culture, withculture now becoming inseparable from all other aspects of society. The integra-tion of culture within the new development of capitalism turns postmodernculture into the cultural logic of late capitalism (Jameson 1984: 55–58, 87).

We can generalize Bauman’s position about postmodern sociology, recallingFrank’s view about poststructuralism as a philosophical rather than a scientificmovement, and state that generally postmodern theorizing, such as that byHassan, is not a sociological metalanguage on postmodern culture, but a nor-mative theorizing internal to it, reflecting the ideological-philosophical views ofan artistic avant-garde. The traits of postmodernism presented by Hassan reveala complex of theoretical positions which, like any other complex of this kind, isnothing other than the formulation of a grand narrative, which is inconsistentwith a supposedly radical theory of small narratives. And this is the other majorcontradiction of postmodernism.

I believe that the preceding discussion shows the close connection betweenpoststructuralism and postmodernism. Postmodernism is the direct, dynamiccontinuity of poststructuralism and the research object of both is comparable(Table 1). However, the difference between American and French culture is noterased: postmodernism is the depoliticized version of poststructuralism.

8 Some comments on today’s and tomorrow’ssemiotics

Matrices 1 and 2 summarize my conclusions on the matrix for the comparison ofthe semiotic currents of the last century, the comparative extension of theobjects of semiotic theories, and the nature of the influence of Marxism on


semiotics, an attempt to follow the evolving dynamics of the domain duringthe past century. This last section extends this glance at the present dynamicsof my two matrices, assesses the positions of the different semiotic currents,and makes some comments about the future development and possibilitiesof semiotics.

The semiotic explosion of the 1960s and 1970s had wide repercussions onthe whole sphere of anthropology, the humanities, and the arts. This impressivediffusion was not without negative effects for semiotics. Frequently, whilesemiotics revitalized the multiplicity of the fields with which it came intocontact, it was absorbed by their traditional habits. Semiotic terminologybecame part of their everyday vocabulary, but in a rather imprecise manner,thus losing its systematic character (something that also happened withMarxism). The width of classical semiotic theory, in combination with its ten-dency to neglect applied aspects of the field, has been an obstacle to itsinstitutionalization in the academy and has limited semiotic teaching so far toisolated courses and a few postgraduate programmes. This width concerns notonly the object of semiotics, but also semiotic theories themselves, as discussedin the previous pages. The domain of Saussurean and Peircean semiotics istoday an evolving, splitting, and conflicting kaleidoscopic domain, creating aconfusing nebula. We should add to this confusion certain historical reinterpre-tations, such as the local renaming of the Moscow-Tartu School as Tartu-MoscowSchool for nationalist reasons or the attempt of John Deely to nominate Peirce asthe first postmodern philosopher and the philosopher of the twenty-first century.

Poststructuralism and postmodernism have been extremely influential in thelast 40 years; like classical structuralism, they were diffused to the fields of thehumanities and the arts and even more widely in the social sciences, where theyreached even human geography. They thus marked the intellectual reflexes ofmany generations of students. It is noticeable, however, that while they werequalitatively dominant, this was not the case with their statistical presence in thebibliography, which shows the simultaneous existence of several other approaches.

At the same time with the postmodern stage of this ideological-philosophicalcurrent, from the beginnings of the eighties, began the diffusion of Peirceansemiotics and biosemiotics, due initially to Sebeok’s activities in both the U.S.(where the Semiotic Society of America became Peircean) and internationally.This diffusion seems to have coincided with a certain decline of postmodernismand may be due to a certain desire to keep up with fashionable trends in thefield, but due to the lack of any deeper knowledge of Peircean semiotics thisinfluence usually takes a rather weak form, from ritual references to ratherelementary attempts at applications; to all appearances, this diffusion willcontinue.


Peircean semiotics has, however, a major epistemological drawback. Anyattempt to directly apply a philosophy to a scientific field encounters insurmoun-table epistemological obstacles. There is a radical difference between philosophyand science: philosophy is a global, universalist view of the world and man anduses general and abstract concepts, while science has to choose only one specificperspective on its object. This perspective is the necessary precondition for theepistemological definition of any scientific field. It follows the “law of relevance”(loi de la pertinence). We encounter this rationale already in Saussure, when hestates that no single science is in a position to exhaust the theoretical description ofany empirical object – for example, the empirical object “society,” “man” or “city.”According to him, each science has to limit itself to only one of the possibleperspectives throughwhich an empirical object can be approached. The importanceof the adoption of such an epistemological perspective may be shown by Saussure’sthesis that, in the case of linguistics, the empirical object of research does not evenexist prior to the development of the perspective, but is constituted by the veryperspective itself (Saussure 1971: 23).

Hjelmslev similarly points out that a theory must be founded on the pre-suppositions that are necessary for its object and poses three conditions rulingscientific description (exhaustiveness, consistency, and economy). Within theframework of a typology of the different semiotics, he defines the epistemologi-cal object of Saussure’s sémiologie (Hjelmslev 1961 [1943]: 10–11, 106–120).Based on Hjelmslev, Greimas and Courtés define what they consider to be therule for scientific description. This rule implies, according to them, that, of thenumerous possible features of an object, only those necessary and sufficient toexhaust its description are selected, that is, that the object must be describedfrom only one specific perspective (Greimas and Courtés 1979: Définition,Description, Opération, Pertinence, Procédure). The same rule is applied byUmberto Eco to define the domain of semiotics. According to Eco, all phenom-ena in society can and must be studied from a semiotic viewpoint and thussemiotics is a general theory of culture and finally a substitute for culturalanthropology; it is of central importance to approach social phenomena semi-otically, “sub specie communicationis.” However, Eco clearly states that socialphenomena as a whole are not reducible to communication and to study them inthis manner does not imply that material life can be reduced to spirit and puremental facts, since such an implication would lead to idealism (Eco 1972 [1968]:25–30 and 1976: 6–7, 26–27, 158).

This difference between philosophy, whether Peircean or, for example,phenomenological, and science has a major implication. Each scientific fieldincorporates four levels of operations, from the more abstract to the moreconcrete: an epistemological level, a theoretical one, a methodological, and a


level of techniques. Philosophy is the background of the first level, but it cannotbe applied without the other levels. Let us take the example of positivism. Therewas never a direct application of positivist epistemology to any scientific field;instead, positivist epistemology led to the constitution of a great number ofscientific fields, such as sociology, anthropology or psychology, founded onpositivism, but defining a set of concepts specifically adapted to the needs ofeach field. This task cannot be accomplished by philosophy. Philosophy doesnot offer any elaborate and analytical methodology, and it never defines tech-niques, without which no application of theory and methodology is possible andthus also no verification of their scientific value. If Peircean philosophy aspiresto be an operational semiotic theory, it can only demonstrate this by using itselfas a starting point for the elaboration of specific semiotics for each cultural field,with their specific methodologies and techniques, a scientific work that has notbeen undertaken by Peircean scholars. Biosemiotics also suffers from this lackand the proof is that Peircean terms represent an extremely small minorityamong current biological terms.

Saussurean theory, on the other hand, belongs to the scientific domain andthus can be applied. There is historical evidence for that, which also shows thatthis possibility did not follow from a direct extrapolation of structural linguis-tics, even if initially this is what occurred. It took many years of intensive work,mainly in the francophone world but also elsewhere, by a very great number ofscholars and for many decades to establish specific principles for the greatvariety of semiotic systems.

The above essential problem with Peircean philosophy is apparent in thedirect transposition of certain terms, such as “firstness,” “abduction” or “index,”to attempts at concrete analyses. These terms are not only too general, but alsostrikingly few, probably no more than twenty. There are two reasons for thisphenomenon. The first is the necessarily general nature of Peirce’s philosophicalterms. The second is that Peircean scholars focus exclusively on the conceptsgiven by Peirce and adopt an exegetical position towards them, with as a resultthe lack of a critical spirit and the ossification of his theory. Thus, there is a lackof philosophical labor on Peirce’s theory with an eye to the general developmentof semiotics. Still, as I already pointed out, this would only be the beginning fortransforming Peirce’s philosophy into specific semiotics.

It is characteristic that Peircean scholars frequently adopt a ritual polemicalreference to Saussure. The fact is that Peirce is absent from any textbook ofcultural studies, which is not the case with French structuralism and poststruc-turalism. Some Peircean scholars attempt to face this lack by extending theirscope to applications in different cultural areas, but they end up just renamingterms without any further contribution to the development of these areas,


formulating static typologies or using terminology metaphorically, as is the casenotably with biosemiotics, which attempts to found itself on concepts such as“sign,” “representation,” and “communication,” and thus suffers from anthro-pomorphism, that is, the naïve projection of culture on nature.

Classical semiotic theory is not in fashion, indeed it is dismissed as positivistand formalist, but the fact is that poststructuralism and postmodernism use agreat number of its concepts (usually in an imprecise manner). The dynamicviews and cultural typologies of the Moscow-Tartu School are missing from thetextbooks,8 though in spite of occasional exaggerated extrapolations theirapproach could be very useful for cultural studies. However, despite the margin-alization of classical semiotics, there are certain fields in which they remainwithout postmodern competitors, and this holds also for linguistics and seman-tics, for example narratology, stylistics, rhetoric, behavioral semiotics, and thesemiotics of the theatre, cinema, music, and cooking.

Classical semiotics is a scientific domain and thus the clash with poststruc-turalism and postmodernism was inevitable. Both these tendencies are notscientific, they do not want to be scientific (“scientistic” is the slogan), theyare philosophical and, violently attacking positivism, adopt – usually in amessianic style – interpretative methods. They have a philosophical and theore-tical background, imbued with ideology, some traces of methodology and notechniques. We should not, however, ignore the fact that they have had one verypositive result, namely, the extension of the horizon of research objects.

Recently, we have witnessed an attempt to articulate semiotics with biologyon the part of cognitive semiotics, for which neuroscience is thought to be thekey for the understanding of semiotic systems. The attempt is in a sensesymmetrical to that of biosemiotics: while biosemiotics aspires to the extrapola-tion of semiotics to biology, the whole of the living world, cognitive semioticsdefends a regression and reduction of semiotics to biology, so as to derivesemiotics from the neurological processes of the brain. There are clear episte-mological limits to this approach, but, as is the case with Peircean philosophy, itseems that they pass unnoticed by the scholars involved in it. Biology may offerknowledge of the biological processes taking place in the biological brain, whichare more or less common to the human species. They are not without interest,since they establish the framework within which semiosis takes place. So far thisenterprise is legitimate, but what should be understood is that this articulation isunable to account for the cultural mind, that is, the structuring of the semioticsystems in their cultural relativity. Any extrapolation from the brain to the mind

8 A fact indicative of an unfortunate scientific isolation.


ends up in an unfortunate search for semiotic universals, a search whichviolates this relativity. It should be clear that, by definition, any concept ofuniversals clashes with the concept of “value,” a key concept of Saussureantheory. Simultaneously, cognitive semiotics reduces a collective phenomenon toan atomistic paradigm, and does not have the theoretical concepts necessary forthe study of collectivities.

In general terms, such an attempt is a residue of the obsolete positivistattempt to found the social sciences on the positive sciences, because (onceupon a time) only the positive sciences were considered “real” sciences, andthus to apply common scientific approaches to these spheres of knowledge, atask that proved historically impossible and non-sensical. I have already madereference to similar attempts, namely, Lévi-Strauss’s ambition to interpret thesemiotic laws through a continuous regression to biology and finally physico-chemical processes and Lotman’s comparable effort to anchor semiotics in theright-left asymmetry of the human brain, regressing to the genetic-molecularlevel and extrapolating to the structure of the universe.

To conclude, I believe that there is a certain interest in the articulation withbiology, provided it is accompanied by the epistemological caution referred toabove. However, this orientation is of marginal interest to semiotics. Semioticsshould turn its attention to a totally different kind of articulation. Certainly,semiotics is defined according to the law of relevance and thus the level onwhich it operates is that of immanent analysis, which allows the description andinterpretation of semiotic systems and texts. This is the common ground thatunites classical semiotics, structuralism, poststructuralism, and postmodernismas well as Peircean theory, namely, operation within the world of signs. Thisenterprise is of course entirely legitimate. It cannot, however, account for theemergence and deeper transformation of the semiotic systems, that is, it doesnot offer an explanation of them, which is what the biologizing approaches arelooking for. Explanation of a system, which is studied immanently, presupposesits integration within the wider system to which it belongs. Explanation of thenature and the logic of the structuring of the semiotic system leads to the needto define this wider system.

Contrary to the impression given by the invasion of cultural studies into thehumanities and the academic institutions to which they belong, such as literaturedepartments, the overall theory of semiotic – cultural – systems is not the domainof the humanities. The theory of semiotic systems is part of the theory of societyand thus of the social sciences. Culture is not the only component of society:culture is inseparable from both the material socioeconomic component of society(including elements such as technology, the technical and social division of labor,social stratification) and its political component (including institutions). Culture


thus is not isolated, but holds a specific epistemological position within the widerwhole of society, depending, in a context of reciprocal relationships, on materialsocial processes. Thus, the wider system integrating semiotic systems is society asa whole. The epistemological articulation of semiotic with material processesleads to a theory of social semiotics (Table 2), which needs to become explicit,or at least always implicit, in semiotic research.

Instead, then, of a biology of semiosis, I propose a political economy of semio-sis, which would be in a position to account for the production of semiotic systems.It is not a novelty, since it is what Bakhtin and Medvedev, as well as Bourdieu,already have proposed. To avoid misunderstandings, political economy only illu-minates the above articulation and explains the general structuring of the semioticsystems, that is, the general organizational axes that traverse them, through thefactor of ideology. However, this only offers the framework for a systematic semioticanalysis and must be completed in depth with the instruments of immanentanalysis, and only classical French semiotics disposes of all the necessary levelsof analysis: epistemology, theory, methodology, and techniques.

This latter point brings us back to the disgraced positivism. Positivism isextremely problematic as a general epistemology and caused the isolation ofscientific fields from each other. Due to the lack of a global theory in the socialsciences and the humanities, each field in its attempt to achieve globality coulddo so only through extrapolation, extrapolation from the part to the whole. Thisway of operating is misleading, because exactly the opposite is true: the part isexplained by the whole. Positivism was rightly criticized, but this does not implythat it should be totally rejected, and there are parts of it, necessary for anyscientific investigation, which do not seem to have found a reliable replacement.I do not plead then for positivism as a general epistemological stance, butI believe that in certain areas of research the formal method is irreplaceable. Itis in this sense that, in the case of culture, I would argue for the positivism ofclassical semiotics. And it is here that classical semiotics will have many thingsto offer in the future, even more if articulated with political economy, eitherexplicitly or at least implicitly, an articulation that inescapably reshapes bothsemiotics and Marxism.

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