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A Semiotic Framework for the Social

Imaginar

FERNANDO ANDACHT, Urugua

[email protected]

[email protected]

Programa de Ps-Graduação em Ciências da Comunicação,

Unisinos (Universidade do Vale do Rio dos Sinos),São Leopoldo, RS, Brasil

ABSTRACT: The paper is an attempt to provide a semiotic or

sociosemiotic basis for the much used notion of «social

imaginary». A frequent notion in the writings on the social

sciences, the social imaginary can benefit from a more strict

characterization. The triadic model of sign action or semiosis

elaborated by C.S. Peirce is ideally suited for that theoretical

framework. Castoriadiss notion of social imaginary is

criticized, and some concrete examples are given of how a

semiotic-based concept can account for some important social

phenomena, namely the representations of mass media in

relation to a countrys hegemonic ideology.

[1

THE RISE OF THE SOCIAL IMAGINARY IN THE IMAGINATION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

Theoretical terms do not escape the fate of other more earthly

and tangible goods: their star rises and falls according to

fashion. There are indications that for some time now THE

SOCIAL IMAGINARY (henceforth, SI ) has occupied a centralplace in some of the recent literature of the social sciences in

Europe and Latin America. A quick look at recent publications





in sociology, history and political science will bring an

abundance of titles such as "The workers' imaginary in

industrial cities (1890-1913)".1 A first doubt arises: is SI a new

concept or just an old one in new garb? The so called death of

ideologies may account for the strategical need to find some

valid substitute for the worn out and no longer attractive

concept of 'ideology'. There is some evidence that this couldbe the case, a sort of lift up job of a traditional approach to

society.2

[2

This paper, however, will explore the first alternative: in spite

of some common concerns with classic studies of ideology or

even 'mentality',3 there is some evidence that we are facing a

new comer to the field. The influential writings of the Greek-

French thinker Cornelius Castoriadis

4

on SI have started a livelydiscussion, even a new perspective for the study of society. In

spite of the many interesting roads opened up by this

provocative concept, there are many problems in accepting

the theory behind SI . Peircean triadic phenomenology, his

phaneroscopy , is postulated here as a more complex and

suitable theoretical environment wherein to develop and

account for some of the valuable implications of SI . Thus I

hope to advance in the construction of a possible

sociosemiotic. The paper ends with a brief consideration of SI in the light of two concrete cases drawn from the transition

from dictatorship towards democracy (1973-1984) in what was

called the first Welfare State of Latin America, Uruguay.

[3

FIRSTNESS AND SI: TWO POSSIBLE ANSWERS TO THE SAME QUESTION

So the social principle is rootedintrinsicall in logic. (5.354)5

A full characterization of SI should deal with both of its

defining aspects, that related to the imagination proper ('imaginary'), and the collective dimension ('social') which

qualifies the former. Of the many definitions to be found in the

work of Castoriadis, the following provides a suitable entry for

such a discussion:

I call imaginary those significations because they do





not correspond to "rational" or "real" elements and

they are not sufficiently dealt with in reference to

them, but they come into being by creation, and I

call them social since they only exist as instituted

and as an object of participation of an impersonal

and anonymous collective entity. (1986:68 emphasis

mine)

6

[4

Prominent in this definition are 'the imaginary social

significations', according to Castoriadis they constitute a key

aspect of SI , its representative power. He further specifies that

this mode of semiotic creativity characterizes the very being

of history - as opposed to the material dimension:

But creation, as the work of the social imaginary of

the instituting society (societas instituens, not

societas instituta), is the mode of being of the

socio-historical realm. Society is self-creation which

unfolds (itself) as history. (1986:73)

[5

Two dimensions then can be clearly elicited from this

definition of SI : its scope (=social) and its nature (= semiotic

capacity). I shall present now both aspects and their

relationship to Peircean semiotic in some detail.[6

Max Weber's influence on Castoriadis is visible and

acknowledged.7 Thus the latter's emphasis that 'man only exists

in society and by society' (1986:66) or that 'the opposition

between individual and society is a total fallacy' (1990:52). In

the same vein, Castoriadis rejects marxism as a form of

'functionalism', a vision he accuses of considering 'society as a

collection or gathering of individuals (...) while both

individuals and things are social creations' (1986:66). For

Castoriadis human imagination can only be studied in its

natural, that is, social environment. What remains outside of it

is just the animal part of man, or, at any rate, something that

cannot become a legitimate object of the social sciences. The

parallelism with Peirce on this point, mutatis mutandis, isagain striking.

[7

In his presentation of phaneroscopy, Peirce highlights both itsformal and its social nature, the latter being a kind of corollary

of the former. He characterizes the phaneron, phaneroscopy's





object, as 'the collective total ... present to the mind' (1.284).

Its social nature is made explicit when Peirce forwards an

answer to a possible question regarding whose mind he refers

to:

If you ask to whose mind, I reply...(I never

entertained) a doubt that those features of the

phaneron that I have found in my mind are present

at all times and to all minds. (1.284, emphasis mine)

[8

A few years later, in one of his last definitions of the sign,

Peirce makes it quite clear that signs are a social instrument,

and semiosis a collective affair:

A Sign has for its Object some fragment of history,

that is, of history of ideas. (Ms 849, 1911)8

[9

Therefore, Castoriadis and Peirce describe a non-individual

sort of entity: both SI as an account of human creativity, and

Firstness, the phaneron's mode of being which accounts for

the possible in human experience, respectively, are construed

as pertaining to the community.[10

Let us now turn to the second definiens of SI , the one dealingwith its semiotic capacity for conceiving the new, or, as

Castoriadis says, for 'instituting' the social. Not only or mainly

a stock or Thesaurus of mental images,9 SI is presented as a

power to bring forth what is not to be found in the previous

social context. The concept is proposed by Castoriadis as an

answer to the central question 'what brings forth new and

different forms of society?' (1986:66):

The central (imaginary) significations are notsignifications "of" something, neither are they

significations "added to" or "referred to" something.

(1975: 320)

[11

'Radical'10 often replaces 'social' as an attribute of 'imaginary'

in Castoriadis. From the above description, I believe 'radical'

should be construed as totally autonomous. Again, the

phaneroscopic category of firstness apparently meets thisdescription:





The quality in itself is a Firstness, a new possibility.

The relation of inherence does not change the

quality in itself, but merely imparts to it existence.11

[12

To sum up Castoriadis' characterization, SI is

a) Capable of Semiotic creativity

b) Radically opposed to the Socially Instituted

c) Absolute or autonomous

I now propose to consider critically these three central

features of SI in the light of the three phaneroscopic

categories for analysing the universal modes of being. My

approach involves the 'development from within' or 'mingling'

of the categories,12 that is, their recursive application to

themselves.

[13

In the Lowell Lectures of 1903, Peirce speaks of three kinds of

firstness, each being the result of exhaustively applying this

category to the whole set. Thus he attains the 'purest

conceptions' or Primity , Secundity and Tertiality (1.533). In

their less abstract manifestation, that is, considering them as

modes of experience, Peirce calls them 'quality, existence and

mentality'. They correspond to each of the three features

which define SI . 'Mentality', one of Peirce's term for the

Firstness of Thirdness captures well the semio-poietic aspect

of SI :

thought in its capacity as mere possibility... mere

mind capable of thinking... (1.537, emphasis mine)

[14

Castoriadis insistently poses SI as an irreconcilable antagonist

of the socially instituted, i.e., as the material and already

legitimized aspects of society. The latter could be construed as

reaction or 'existence', the Firstness of Secondness, minus the

polemical dimension so central in Castoriadis' theory, i.e., as

the sheer actualization of the possible:

'the general Firstness of all true Secondness is

existence' (1.532)

[15





Last, in order to account for the autonomy of SI , we have the

category at its most abstract or 'pure Firstness', the subject

considered

'positively such as it is, regardless of aught else (...)

only a positive qualitative possibility' (1.25).

[16

But what is the point of this matching and reconciling

operation? Just a neat arrangement to conclude both Peirce

and Castoriadis are talking about the same, but use a different

terminology? Far from such a superfluous exercise, I propose

to construe SI as constituted of three aspects or phaneroscopic

dimensions.13 The advantage of this approach over Castoriadis'

absolutist, non-relational model of society is clear. Below I

attempt to deconstruct in Derridean fashion Castoriadis'

apparent dyad into a monad: the only "true" realm being SI .Before that, and to show the main flaw of the theory of SI , Iwant to present some of the conclusions at which M. Balat

arrives when he compares Peirce's triad to Lacan's imaginary-

real-symbolic.[17

Balat (1992: 106) draws a convincing parallelism between

psychoanalysis and semiotic; in both theories each category is

already presentas a possibility

in the other two:

(Firstness) is not pure form, but form already

"worked upon" by the other two instances. The

three categories of Peirce (correspond with) the

originality of the primordial form, the obsistence of

objectivation, and the transuasion of language.

[18

For Balat there is an homology between semiotic Firstness and

psychoanalytic Imaginary . Both are three-in-one conceptions:

each is a 'matrix' which bears 'in germ' the other two

categories. Instead of talking of one category, SI , pitted

against the other, as in Castoriadis' (pseudo) dichotomy, I

propose the necessary interplay of three categories: mentality,

reaction and qualitative possibility. Castoriadis (1975:308-12)

speaks of 'capitalism's imaginary social signification' as being

something different from and opposed to capitalists, actual

machines and market laws. In a similar vein, Peirce talks of the'total feeling' or ' flavour ' of the King Lear tragedy, as an

illustration of 'universal Firstness', something which is to be





found neither in the actual dramatic experience nor in the

language of the play. The two examples seem to refer to the

same concept. However, the semiotician insists throughout his

vast work that the structure of experience is made up of three

and no less than three dimensions, and the three are equally

important and central to semiosis. For Castoriadis 'difference'

means radical "confrontation." This leads me to anotherapparent point in common between the two models, which

also turns out to be a substantial difference.

[19

WHO IS AFRAID OF THE IMAGINARY?

Nothing separates me more surel

from that unreal object: the

imaginar world is entirel isolated ,

I cannot penetrate in it except by

becoming unreal.

(Sartre, 1940:253 emphasis mine)

Just like Peirce, Castoriadis (1986:152) explicitly disclaims all

ontological commitments, those that lead Sartre, for example,

to reject the imaginary realm because it is 'unreal and

inexistent':

Phaneroscopy is the description of the phaneron...

the collective total of all that is in any way or in any

sense present to the mind quite regardless of whether it corresponds to any real thing or not.(1.284, emphasis mine)14

[20

Ironically, it is Castoriadis' unacknowledged ontological

commitment which accounts for the main flaw of SI

as asociosemiotic model. To prove this, I must make a short

digression.[21

To understand the full purport of SI , we must place it in the

light of an old intellectual controversy on the power, good or

evil, of images, a field that a recent study called 'iconology'.15

The larger-than-life, even titanic aura around SI in Castoriadis'

descriptions should be read as a reaction to the ideas of Jean

Paul Sartre in a book-long study which precisely bears the titleof The imaginary .16 Sartre's basic contention is that what he

calls 'l'imaginaire' is to be blamed for much that is inauthentic,





false and even perverse in human life, as the following

eloquent description shows:

We can distinguish two classes of feelings: the true

feelings and the imaginary ones. The latter are

unreal and only appear in front of unreal objects,

and the apparition of the real ones is sufficient to

make them run away, just like the sun clears the

shadows of the night. (1940:280)

[22

The French thinker's damning account of mental images makes

him a fervent iconoclast. Besides, he approaches the issue as

something pertaining to the individual, not to society. This is

the exact reversal of Peirce's own account of the effect of

mental images on human action, as we shall see later. What in

Sartre is helplessness to deal with reality or bad faith,17

constitutes the very engine for any possible change, for the

semiotician. More recent notions such as 'the effect of the

real' and 'the illusion of a direct renvoi to reality',18 attributed

to images or to the iconic domain, can be read as later days

avatars of Sartre's iconoclasm. Such conceptions bespeak of a

fascinating but treacherous legerdemain imputed to images

and to what can be imagined through them. The seduction of

the (supra) sensual is thus morally opposed to the reasonablepersuasion of the logical and the reassuring sturdiness of the

real.[23

At first sight, Castoriadis' own position about the imaginary

seems to be closer to Peirce on this point, but his fervent

iconophilia,19 leads him to a monadic vision that is quite alien

to the Peircean triadic epistemology. Actually, SI is presented

in the guise of a true hero embattled against society's

reactionary reified ways, namely 'instituted society'. This is thedirect outcome of Castoriadis' rejection of a central semiotic

concept, that of determination.20

Essentially, the imagination is rebellious to

determination. (The already instituted) conditions

and limits it - but it does not determine it. (1988:

150)21

[24

It is at this point that Peirce and Castoriadis part ways.

Firstness and SI do have many points in common, which we





could sum up in their poietic and autonomous nature. To

define Firstness as those 'qualities themselves which, in

themselves, (are) mere may-bes, not necessarily realized'

(1.304) does not imply to forswear, however, 'some

determination, otherwise we shall think nothing at all' (1.303).

Determination, then, is not contradictory but complementary

with the kind of cooperative action Peirce called "semiosis":

an action or influence, which is or involves the

cooperation of three subjects (...) such a tri-relative

influence not being in any way resolvable into

actions between pairs. (5.484)

[25

While semiosis involves a network of relationships without

which it just would not make sense, in both senses of the term

- it would not be able to generate meaning, and it would be

alien to Peircean relational semiotics - Castoriadis' SI relies on

a pollemical or dualistic model. From the perspective of such a

model, life in society is an either/or duel between the positive

forces of the radical imagination or SI , on the one hand, and

its reified and antagonistic products on the other. This has a

familiar look: it is G.Vico's verum factum principle revisited in

the dark light of Orwellian social dystopia. My assumption

accounts for Castoriadis' many references throughout his workto 'the concealment of' SI or to its 'total and flagrant

occultation' by philosophy. This conspiracy usually bears the

name of 'traditional ontology', its principal instrument

(weapon?) being 'the fundamental hypercategory of

determination (Greek peras, German Bestimmheit)' (1986:65).[26

Far from being an obstacle to emancipation or the source of

human stagnation, determination is what makes semiosis

evolve:

A Sign is a Cognizable that, on the one hand is so

determined (that is specialized, bestimmt) by

something other than itself, called its Object, while

on the other hand, it so determines some actual or

potential Mind... (8.177)22

[27

It is not very hard to deconstruct Castoriadis' apparentbinarism into its underlying monad:23 all the power to the

(radical) imagination. Against what Castoriadis states, his





reductionistic model has, in fact, room for only one element,

SI , the 'instituting force'; the rest is nothing but its shadow or,

better still, nemesis - the very role imputed to the imaginary by

Sartre. In Castoriadis' model, the instituted is conceived of as

the negative moment of the social. The new to come and the

already established in society are 'winter-locked brothers', to

use Dylan Thomas's powerful expression for a deadly fraternalstalemate 24

[28

What Castoriadis has in mind, actually, is not determination,

the process whereby signs grow and reference of one sign to

another results, but determinism which, indeed does lead to

the abolition of time and change, as Castoriadis fears.25 By

conflating Secondness - experience and facts or teukhein,

Castoriadis' (1975: 315) term for the instrumental or technical

domain, with Thirdness, his legein, as the dimension of representation and speech (Ibid ) in a single realm, the

instituted or reified society cut off from SI , we end up with a

pollemical and rigid binary framework that pursues the

imposition of one term over the other. It is this non-relational

scheme and not determination which disavows time and

change.[29

What is then the crucial difference between considering as

Peirce does, that which is not related to anything else, namelyFirstness, and that which being radical and autonomous is alien

to any determination, namely SI ? The answer is prescision, the

kind of logical analysis Peirce borrows from Duns Scotus for

his phaneroscopy.26 After postulating the triadic structure as

inseparable from the structure of the phaneron, Peirce

considers the three essential elements of any form of semiosis

at its most abstract, just A, B and C:

There must be one of the three, at least say C,

which establishes a relation between the other two,

A and B. The result is that A and B are in a dyadic

relation, and C may be ignored , even if it cannot be

supposed absent. (Ms 908)

[30

The difference then is that which exists between pretending

something is not there for the sake of analysis ( prescision),

'our imagination (being only) constrained by the reality of the

phaneron',27 and claiming that there is only one true or





authentic social force, SI , while the rest is sheer antagonism to

it. Thus an ontological claim has gotten in through Castoriadis'

back door: the absolute hegemony of SI over everything else in

society. The actual existing institutions and their generality or

legitimacy are forced together in a single dimension, the

inevitable and antagonistic forces of the instituted. This is

what separates Peircean mobile semiotic from Castoriadis'static social theory. The former respects Ockham's razor: it

does not need to include any kind of supremacy to account for

the production of new information in society. Neither does it

call for the supposition of a conspiracy of silence over the

ways of SI .[31

My next step will involve a demonstration of the adequacy of

the triadic model to account for changing society, conceived

as an endless journey from the hardened preconceptions of experience to the reasonable realm of verisimilitude through

the fragile ('airy nothingness') realm of dreams.

[32

AT PEIRCE'S KITCHEN: DREAM PIES, SHOCKING APPLES ANDSWEET DESIRES

'Einmal ist keinmal'

(German proverb)

Peirce takes us in a guided tour through the kitchen of his

semiotic, there he gives us a recipe for wishing, asking,

preparing and eventually getting an apple pie, which is also a

recipe for understanding the working of phaneroscopy. Thus,

we witness the semiotic process whereby the possible, the

actual and the general work together to produce sense.

[33

It all starts with a quite simple craving expressed in a not so

simple manner:'An apple pie is desired' (1.341).28 Why use the

marked syntax, the passive, instead of the much more obvious

and unmarked active form, e.g. I desire an apple pie? The

passive voice, I think, is central for Peirce's purpose here. The

absent, and thus unmarked, passive subject of that sentence -

by me or by somebody - points to the presence of a collective,

anonymous semiotic agent, what Aristotle called doxa.29 So

the sentence could be paraphrased thus: It is well seen orcompletely legitimate to desire an apple pie (and not a snake

pudding, for instance). Desire is thus presented as a form of





Thirdness or generality , the explicit topic of the whole

paragraph. In an apparent contradiction to the very formula he

uses ('an apple pie') and to common sense, Peirce deems it

impossible to desire anything as an absolute singularity , 'we

seldom, probably never desire a single individual thing'. What

we obtain as a result of that desire is, he adds, 'a certain

pleasure of a certain kind.' [34

Thus Peirce links 'desire' and 'generality' in a strong way.

"Desire" in this technical sense appears to be what elsewhere

he calls the social 'endorsement'30 or convalidation of what

may be recognized or acknowledged as a demand. We can

desire anything but not every thing in the same way. Even a

debauchee like the Marquis de Sade, just like any black mass

acolyte, knows well that in order to infringe a ritual one must

be a thorough and knowledgeable, even if renegade orquestionable, performer of that very ritual. Otherwise it is not

out of perversion but out of sheer ignorance that one behaves

in that peculiar fashion (wild orgies or inverted crosses). To

desire the unlawful one must be well read in the law, as saint

Paul reminds us:

What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid.

Nay, I had not known sin but by the law... (Saint

Paul, Romans, 7:7)

[35

Indeed without the law the desire to sin or to eat an apple pie

is 'dead'. To talk of a desire for 'a kind of pleasure' not for a

single one, is to describe the (socio)semiotic place from where

we formulate all our desires. It is because apple pies are a

normal source of (North American) gastronomic delight that

one/Peirce feels entitled to ask for them on certain occasions.

This concrete circumstance brings us to anotherphaneroscopic category. Secondness is 'the experience of

pleasure' which is a once only sort of event, i.e., the haecceity determined by that particular pastry I ate on a certain

occasion. However, that alone is not what allows me to

conceive of apple pies as an edible and tempting dessert.[36

A desire, no matter how legitimate, and solid green apples, are

not enough, Peirce's recipe leaves for the last that 'airy

nothing' (6.455) which makes the world go round; we are

talking about the 'dream of eating' such a pie. Guided by





Peirce's desire for a kind of sweetness (a typical pastry), the

cook handles 'shocking', i.e., real apples31, but does so to

'realize the dream of eating an apple pie' in him. This 'dream'

is Firstness, and as such it lacks 'prominent thirdness, it is

utterly irresponsible: it is whatever it pleases'. Instead of

opposing this volatile element or pure, unrealized quality to the

generality of law (social institutions), as Castoriadis does,Peirce links both realms in a radical manner: 'desire has

nothing to do with particulars; it relates to qualities.'[37

Translated in terms of the triadic sign relation this means that

'an interpretant is simply the addressing of an impression to a

concept', as one of the drafts of the "New List" of 1867 puts

it.32 The path of semiotic determination (the 'addressing') runs

from the manifold of impressions or pure qualities to the unity

of a concept or general. Desire refers to these qualities, andthus transitively connects the concrete instances of experience

to the concept.

[38

FROM TYPICAL SAFETY TO RISKY POSSIBILITY

Let us recapitulate our apple pie recipe. Some 'fragment of the

history of ideas' (Ms 849), not only the pie as a traditional

pastry but also the familiar sensation of appetite at a regularhour and place, i.e., the sign as Secondness determines a

range of possible, unrealized qualities, the sign as Firstness.

The vision or 'dream' of something or anything sweet

constitutes the possibilities to be determined. This airy realm

of absolute freedom is steered to a goal: of the myriad ways of

satisfying that familiar experience of appetite there is the

probable or acceptable manner associated with apple pies (in

general). Of course, there is always the possibility of not

wanting to eat that (traditional) kind of food. In this tensionbetween the unexpected and innovative and the wholly typical

and established way lies what we call (human) freedom.

[39

I foresee an objection to my example: the desire of an apple

pie seems to leave us well within the safe boundaries of the

wholly acceptable and predictable. Castoriadis' point is

precisely that the instituted in society prevents us from

imagining new ways, and from even seeing ourselves ascapable of excercising that power. There are, however, two





instances which come from Peirce's work to help me prove

that it is in the cooperation of the categories and the semiotic

subjects of the sign that we are to find possible new ways, not

in the dyadic confrontation of Firstness and the other two

realms fused into one.[40

On one occasion, Peirce tells us, he must kill time at a railway

station. So he starts reading the advertisements on the walls

and musing about

different trains and different routes which I never

expect to take, merely fancying myself to be in a

state of hesitancy. (5.394)

[41

Slight as this imaginative occasion seems,33 Peirce sees in this

'feigned hesitancy' the very same attitude demanded by 'theproduction of scientific inquiry' (5.394). The gap between the

banal and the sublime, when Firstness as an imaginary journey

is concerned, seems to be narrow. The possible itineraries

traced by 'the firstness of thirdness' or 'mentality' (1.533) may -

or may not - play a decisive role at some non-theoretical

future occasion, as the next example shows.[42

Twice Peirce writes about the anecdote of how his brother

Herbert, when he was 'scarce more than a child', reacted with

astonishing deftness and courage to an accident in his house.34

The explanation the semiotician gives is that his brother had

previously imagined that dangerous circumstance. So his

behaviour is presented as 'a striking example of a real habit

produced by exercises in the imagination' (5.487). Still more

central to the argument presented in this paper is Peirce's

explicit connexion of the possibilism of imagination (Firstness)

with the lawfulness of habit, as a general tendency (Thirdness):

This act of stamping with approval, "endorsing" as

one's own, an imaginary line of conduct so that it

shall give a general shape to our actual future

conduct is what we call a resolve. (5.538, 1902)

[43

Such a process, we are told, is pertinent not so much for the

sake of 'practical beliefs' but for theoretical ones. I do not

doubt to include among the latter the kind of political

engineering we are familiar with since Plato's Republic. Both





cases I take to be illustrations of how 'a mere imagination of

reacting in a particular way seems to be (...) capable of

causing the imagined kind of reaction really to take place'

(5.538). There is also an interesting coincidence between

Peirce's mental experiments and the role Erving Goffman

(1986:277-78) attributes to fictional frames such as the theater

or cinema in society. Artistic portrayals of taboo subjects arenot to be taken only as symptoms of what goes on in the

community - mere reflections of reality - argues Goffman, but

as imaginary experiments which actually bring about more

tolerance concerning the real situations they depict fictionally.

[44

OF THE DAYS AND DREAMS OF JOSÉ BATILE Y ORDÑEZ

We shall move now from Peirce's homely culinary backstage to

the high power kitchen where Realpolitik is cooked. The leap

from Peirce's sweet dream of apple pie to the vision of a new

kind of society is bold but feasible. Contrary to appearances,

from that domestic realm to the macropolitical scene there is

a change in size, not necessarily in structural complexity.

[45

There was once a man who hated bullfights, loved culture and

became the democratic leader35 of Latin America's first full

fledged welfare State. After his first term as president of

Uruguay (1903-1907), José Batlle y Ordóñez (henceforth JBO)

was living in Europe, not just waiting for the occasion to run

for re-election, but passionately studying the ways of European

democracies and how the sociopolitical system of his own

country, Uruguay, could be changed in order to resemble all

that he considered admirable in the modern nations of the Old

World (particularly Switzerland). It is in this mood that he

writes a letter to two of his close political allies in Uruguay. Init we can reconstruct the exciting experiences he had had, his

dream of a brave new political world and the desire for

building it:

I think of what we could do to build a small model

country where education is vastly spread, where

arts and sciences are cultivated with honour, where

ways are mild and refined. (February 7, 1908)

[46

This 'utopist's'36 statement became the very foundation of





modern Uruguay's SI , one which in spite of severe economic

crisis, a decade of dictatorship, and other social upheavals

seems to still enjoy good health, eight decades after JBO's

days. Thus was born the realm of mesocracy or the social

hegemony of the average, the non-exceptional, a white collar

empire of civil servants, doctors and lawyers. The calm

exploits of these low key figures have been celebrated over thefeats of industrial enterpreneurs, captains of capitalism, or

military heroes. Bureaucrats and politicians seem to embody

best the mesocratic ideals.[47

I do not intend to make out of that capable statesman a

superhuman figure, one who had in his brain the perfect and

final shape of the future country he dreamt of, and which he

then single-handedly built. Far from that, what I propose here

is a sociosemiotic analysis which accounts for modernUruguayan ideology as a continuum of permanence and

change. As part of such a continuum, JBO's sociopolitical

desire became the driving force with which all dreams,

individual and collective, had to negotiate to become true

(desires). Such a negotiation, I believe, is mostly unconscious,

like many other semiosic acts which 'sink into consciousness'

and thus become 'automatized and mindless', as Merrell

(1991:10) rightly asserts. Thus the strength but also the flaws

of Castoriadis' model and the convenience of the

phaneroscopic categories as the basis of an alternative one

will become apparent. Instead of the reductionistic dichotomy

of an oppressive instituted social realm opposed to what may

still be imagined or dreamt of, I appeal to a triadic model. In it

to move from Secondness - what has been, the semiotic Object

as everybody's archeology - to Thirdness - what will be as habit

or tendency - necessarily involves crossing the domain of

'irresponsible' vision, which furnishes a global, 'tout ensemble'emotional tone to life in society. Two examples will help me to

illustrate this constant although not conscious process whereby

JBO's legacy is reshaped and even reinvented in Uruguayan

society.[48

By 1980, the Uruguayan military had not only broken brutally

with the legitimate order of mesocracy dreamt of by JBO, but

were ruling a financially successful country. 37 Still, they

deemed it necessary to have an election, actually a plebiscite,

in order to change the constitution and make their presence in





power legitimate. What was the need, one could ask, since

they were absolute and efficient, albeit ruthless, rulers?38 Only

the fully 'irresponsible' dream of Firstness, combined with the

country's many decades of democracy (Secondness) and the

goal or telic force defined by the mesocratic myth (Thirdness)

can account for their strange attitude. In JBO's letter, just

before the quoted passage, the statesman had written abouthis distress on hearing about a project to legitimize once again

in Uruguay the then banned bullfights:

(Bullfights) would be in my opinion a step towards

barbarianism, which is the kind of pleasure felt in

front of the risk of human life, and of bloodshed,

even if this be not always human.

[49

Universal learning was supposed to suppress such bloodthirsty

leanings. The military just like the Uruguayan guerrilla, the

MLN-Tupamaros or National Liberation Movement, had rebelled

against that peaceful dream, inseparable from JBO's ideal of a

quiet nation of cultivated mesocrats. Within this sociosemiotic

framework to vote had always meant far more than a civic

duty, it was one of the highest gifts of that 'model country'.39

Not even the military could dispatch that desire into total

oblivion. I take their attitude as an evidence of the utterfreedom of the imaginary; firstness indeed goes where it

pleases, in a wholly 'irresponsible' way. Without any physical or

political resistance in the country, these all powerful de factorulers dreamt of appealing to the democratic approval of an

election. It was their 'musement' (6.461) which took them to

the paradoxical position of dreaming and then officially

desiring the impossible. So in 1980, through a plebiscite, they

sought for a collective endorsement of their government. With

almost no media support the opposition won: 57% voted

against the plebiscite's proposal of a constitutional amendment

presented by the dictatorship. Paradoxically, the military's

electoral defeat was a consequence of the people's own

mesocratic dream, translated as a desire to vote for real

politicians, beyond any concern with the actual (healthy) state

of the economy. My hypothesis is that had these military not

shared, partly at least, the mesocratic dream, they would not

have invested elections with that kind of value.40 This wrongpolitical move is precisely what constitutes their 'Originality'.41





This is a semiotic dimension which is neither reasonable nor

practical, if I had to name it, maybe 'esthetic' would suit it

best.[50

A second example. On May 8th, 1989, the corpse of one of the

men that had dramatically changed Uruguayan modern history,

the guerrilla leader Raúl Sendic, is brought back to the country

for his massive burial.42 Television faces a dilemma: shall they

miss one of the greatest news of the year, or shall they risk to

show it in all its multitudinous pomp and glory? To do the

former is bad for business, but to do the latter runs counter to

mesocratic norms: it is to put one of the "bullfighters" banned

by JBO full in the limelight. Two of the three private channels

choose silence, but the third comes up with an ingenious if

farfetched strategy.[51

The 7.30 pm news of Channel 10 begins that day with an

announcement of an announcement of an announcement. This

complex triple structure includes

a. first, a brief and vague preliminary comment on a

'rather unusual beginning',

b. the use of an old News fragment from 1984, and

c. the "official" introduction back in 1989

[52

This elaborate presentation is supposed to insulate in a triple

metamessage the explosive potential of broadcasting this

burial. After a very slight routine opening, came the 1984

piece, which was not announced as such but simply broadcast

as a "normal" introduction of the day's news. In it a visibly

upset anchorman speaks to his audience about starting to

broadcast once again, after a week-long suspension decreed

by the military.43 At a climactic moment of his stern narrative,

he asserts with suffused anger that the dictatorship had thus

achieved what not even a terrorist act of the Uruguayan MLN-

guerrilla had been able to do. Back to the present, and still

without any mention of this peculiar back and forth

movements, the 1989 anchorman comments on an irony of the

recovered democracy: the MLN (by then a political party) is

now able to bring the corpse of their leader back to thecountry and have it buried with the full ceremony of a hero.

After so many expensive prime time digressions, the newsman





finally goes to point:

As an homage to the democracy we are all trying to

build... we begin our news of today with a coverage

of the arrival and burial of the body of R.Sendic...

[53

The third and most explicit metamessage discloses the "teamwork" of dream, desire and experience. This news program

has imagined a new possible way for showing what could not

be shown, at least not as a legitimate desire of that mesocratic

channel. How to cover this burial and not seem to be also

paying an homage to the guerrilla leader? How to stop

television from using its audiovisual power to make that ritual

even more glorious, by showing it to a much larger crowd than

the one that had attended the ceremony? Thus television

dreamt of this complicated box-within-a-box format for not

endorsing this kind of radical politics, and still show the

massive and highly moving participation of a huge crowd of

followers of the dead leader in this last good-bye. Television

news is endorsing 'democracy', not the man and his deeds,

announces the complex framing device set up for that specific

coverage. There was also that chief mesocratic desire of not

being extreme or outstanding. In another democratic country,

five years after the end of the dictatorship, that piece of newswould have had enough intrinsic historic value to amply justify

the possible risk of television coverage's being interpreted as

an apology for the no longer existent terrorist movement of

the previous decade.[54

The final metamessage quoted above does not tell the truth

though: they do not 'begin the news' of that day by the

coverage of R.Sendic's burial. Actually, they begin by showing

an intricate, long negotiation between desire, dream andexperience, the phaneroscopic mingling of the lawfulnes of

Thirdness, the irresponsible pure qualities of Firstness and the

hard historical facts of Secondness.[55

In my two examples, there is the creation of something new

inseparable from the experience of the past and from the

future goal pursued by semiosis. This is the way SI operates. By

calling for a plebiscite the military unwittingly begin the long

road that would end their dictatorship; the only Uruguayan

channel which dares to cover that multitudinous funeral opens





up a new possibility for dealing w ith delicate political subjects

on Uruguayan television. There is in both episodes the

possibilistic vision which attempts to come to terms in an

original manner with 'a fragment of the history of ideas',

Peirce's (Ms 817) description of the past as represented in

semiosis, and also to meet the goal of all sense production,

i.e., to become legitimate.

44

[56

Instead of talking of these two instances, as Castoriadis

probably would, as if they were two battles won by SI , two

victories of the 'radical imaginary' over the dark forces of the

instituted, I prefer to think of these episodes in terms of the

'trirrelative influence' of the phaneroscopic categories and the

logical subjects of Peircean semiotic. The three realms are

equally real, the three participate actively in the progressive

determination of what we call human (social) life. Which onepredominates is a question that cannot be answered a priori,but one that a Peircean-based sociosemiotic should be able to

study and answer on each particular occasion.

[57

ON THE IMPORTANCE OF BECOMING VERISIMILAR: KALS,ÉTHOS, EIKS, THREE SOCIOSEMIOTIC DIMENSIONS

My journey through the mysterious land of the social imaginaryis about to end. There are many valuable insights to be found

in it. But to appreciate them, we must accept the force of

determination as the nature of all meaning. Determination is

not the prison-house of wishes, but the power that moves

semiosis in its three aspects as Firstness, Secondness and

Thirdnes and as Sign, Object and Interpretant. This points out

to the relational nature of social meaning. Phaneroscopy and

semiotic proper provide a reliable theoretical framework for

the study of issues such as ideology, public opinion andcollective identity. This is, I believe, the sociosemiotic realm,

accurately described by Flynn (1991:5) as the locating and

analysing of 'meaning structures and signification systems from

the point of view of the producers' use and conceptualization

of them.'

[58

If we leave aside the deadlock confrontation of an instituting

or radical imaginary pitted against the instituted or socio-historical imaginary, a far more complex and interesting





semiotic landscape emerges. To attain a better understanding

of its workings, we need to go one step down in the

architectonic of Peirce's science classification. It is to the

normative realm of esthetics, ethics and logic that I now

appeal to find the rules that account for society's ways in a

'retrodictive' manner.45 Originality is absolutely unconnected

only when prescinded, that is, when considered by itself foranalytic purposes. In the actual semiosis of the Lebenswelt, itreceives its own specification (Bestimmtheit) from the past

(knowledge as 'history of ideas'), while it further specifies that

dual relationship in terms of the law.[59

The three normative sciences (2.198-199) attend to what is

kalós (right as goodness), ethos (one's own acknowledged

purposes) and eikós. Since mine is a sociosemiotic

perspective, I have substituted Peircean 'logic', i.e., 'the studyof the means of attaining the end of thought' (2.198), for the

spontaneous methods used by people - Logica Utens - for

becoming verisimilar or eikós. The latter is to social

interaction what the former is to science. The relationship of

the three domains precludes the supremacy of one over the

rest. We may be inspired by the kalós, as Peirce seems to

suggest,46 but the past as the burden and also assurance of

what has been thought of, and the future as the 'ascending

mimesis' of human aspiration,47 contribute in equal parts to

produce society as co-produced meaning.[60

These normative sciences allow us to reconstruct the ways of

society according to the three semiotic dimensions present in

every action. Human purpose in society is the resultant of

personal visions, objective conditions and collective projects

acting in close interaction with the limits of semiotic systems.

Based on Peirce's interpretant, Liszka (1989:61-96) developsthe concept of transvaluation. It is a remarkable synthesis of

linguistic theory (markedness and hierarchy) and Peircean

pragmaticism (the central role played by purpose). Liszka

defines "transvaluation" as

The comprehension of sign translation in terms of

rank and markedness (...). In its most general form,

transvaluation is a rule-like semiosis which

revaluates the perceived, imagined, or conceived markedness and rank relations of a referent as





delimited by the rank and markedness relations of the system of its signans and the teleology of thesign user . (1989:71 - emphasis in the original)

[61

Concerning the same theoretical issue, Shapiro (1981:315)

talks about an 'evaluative superstructure' in order to describe

the process of reframing the sign-object reference in terms of human designs. This is an account of the dialectical tension

between these two telic forces: the semiotic agency and the

system's own pattern.48 I would like to add a third element to

this configuration. The third factor involved in transvaluation

is verisimilitude, a central matter of classical rhetoric. In his

Rhetoric (1357a 34-36), Aristotle defines the verisimilar - tóeikós - as that which 'happens in general (...) it concerns that

which may be in some other way.' From this perspective, wemay think of a person as 'a semiotic squid which covers up its

non-verisimilar movements under the thick semiotic fluid of a

seemingly easy consensus'.49 Transvaluation is the theoretical,

and, therefore, general term which accounts for the whole

range of strategies used by people to attain this specifically

human aim. Many years ago, Goffman's teacher, Ray

Birdwhistell (1970:14) expressed this idea in a most succint

manner: 'being in some measure predictable constitutes the

sine qua non of sanity and humanity.' To become eikós is tostand in the right end of transvaluation: to make our actions

and purposes seem unmarked , i.e., normal. Normality, in this

sense, means that others may accept us and our demands

without jeopardizing their own semiotic systems.[62

Transvaluation, Liszka's central contribution for the study of

the acceptance and rejection of ideas (in the guise of stories,

myths, fables, movies, etc), helps us understand how the three

normative domains of what is deemed kalós, êthos and eikósmeet and mingle to create sense in society. We can predict

human behavior, in spite of admitting the sheer creative

freedom of Firstness as SI , because of that tripartite semiotic

cooperation which is guided but not tyrannized by the

hegemonic (= unmarked) values in a community. We may make

our greatest efforts to attain certain collective ideals, but,

whether we know it or not, our actions end up by

transforming these norms, and thus changing the past.[63

Human life consists in the triple coexistence of the right thing





or kalós, with the familiar behavior or êthos, all leading to the

social endorsement or eikós. The weight of past experience

connects with the whirlpool or anarchy of wishes and with the

aspiration of continuity or agreement with what is

consensually defined as true at a certain moment in the life of

a community.[64

Of course, nothing in real life and politics is as simple and

smooth as I have presented it in this paper. There will be

regressions and breakdowns: the Obsistence of tough interests

levelled painstakingly by the Transuasion of constant

negotiations. However, for the judge (the law) to find the

proper sheriff (the actual), as in Peirce's famous example

(7.532), we must also have the legislator as a dreamer (the

possible). Without the imaginary resolve to leave behind a

world where the use of violence is the tacit rule, we do noteven have or need a judge to begin with. To the poets, and

pure mathematicians mentioned by Peirce in the Universe of

Firstness (6.455), I would like to add law-makers and fashion

designers, and just about anyone whose 'airy nothings' furnish

the limitless space where we house our desires.

NOTES

Click on the note number to return to the place in the text

where the reference to the note occurs.

1 Some other recent examples: J.Arnason (1989), G.Cornu

(1990); A.Moles (1987)

2 I will not follow this lead, though it seems also promising.The description of ideology in D.Vidal (1971:36), based on N.

Poulantzas, as a device to conceal in 'an imaginary plane real

contradictions' shows an interesting parallelism with SI : 'It isnot representation which gives the key of ideological

intelligibility, it is the "opacity" of its structure which makes

that representation intelligible'.

3 The kind of historical analysis associated with J. Le Goff and

his school. A famous instance is his description of the 'birth of the purgatory' in medieval times (La naissance du Purgatoire). I





shall also leave aside the anthropological approach of the

imaginary associated with G. Durand.

4 As a fair sample of his thought, reference will be made to

Castoriadis 1975, 1986, 1990. These texts cover almost three

decades of elaboration of the SI concept.

5 References to Peirce are made in the conventional way: tovolume and paragraph of Hartshorne, Weiss and Burks (eds),

(1931-58). Manuscripts references are to Robin (1967).

6 An obvious source of the SI notion is Aristotle's speculation

on human fantasy, as the author explicitly acknowledges. See

Castoriadis' (1988: 149-76) discussion of the 'first fantasy' in

"The discovery of the imagination".

7 Castoriadis (1990:39) calls himself 'an old acquaintance andadmirer of Max Weber'. For a detailed account of this point see

"Individu, société, rationalité, histoire", in Castoriadis (1990).

8 This consideration pertains to Peirce's Speculative Rhetoric

(e.g. 1.444), since the problem of 'collateral observation' is

presupposed by any study of human communication, namely

the common cultural universe of reference between

individuals.

9 Such a reductionistic fallacy is found in much of the current

literature on SI , e.g. in the approach of Moles (1987).

10 For my present purpose, I will neglect an early distinction

made by Castoriadis (1975: 328) between 'social imagination

as instituting society' and the 'radical imagination as what

creates at the psychological and somatic level.'

11 V. Potter (1967:15)

12 Ibid .

13 In the same sense in which Liszka (1989:38, emphasis

mine) says Object, Sign and Interpetrant 'are but three aspects

of the process of sign determination.'

14 Another approach which I deem central to the foundation

of a Peircean based sociosemiotic is Erving Goffman's frameanalysis. He presents it in distinctly non-ontological terms, not

based on but akin to phaneroscopy. Goffman (1986:6)





criticizes the James-Schutzian idea of 'multiple

worlds/realities' since 'what (scholars) are often concerned

with is not an individual's sense of what is real, but rather,

what it is he can get caught up in, engrossed in... and this can

be something he can claim is really going on and yet claim is

not real.'

15 The term is used by W.J.T. Mitchell (1986) in a suggestive

essay, "The rhetoric of iconoclasm".

16 Of course, I do not mean that Sartre is the only thinker

involved in this controversy, Castoriadis mentions Merleau

Ponty, and many others could be included. The former's work

is only an illustration of this ideological position, and a

paradigmatic one at that.

17 This is an echo of Marxian 'false consciousness', as it is

formulated in The German Ideology : an optically distorted

image of man's real social conditions which serves the

interests of the ruling class.

18 Barthes (1970) and Sercovich (1977), respectively. For an

interesting Peircean approach to this issue see F. Merrell's

(1991:8) discussion of two types of 'de-generacy' whereby the

sign relations become 'indexicalized' (R-O) and 'iconized' (R-I).The former leads the semiotic agent to believe in a direct

access to reality without semiotic mediation, the latter to such

an engrossment in sign fiction that we forget 'it is not the

"real" thing.'

19 I refer thus to his radicalization of the SI concept: 'the

radical imaginary.'

20 Castoriadis (1975:283-334 and 1986:65) appeals to theGerman concept of 'Bestimmheit', just as Peirce (8.177) does,

but for the opposite purpose.

21 When he describes the emergence of capitalism,

Castoriadis (1989:310, emphasis mine) argues about the

insufficiency of 'things for making capitalistic relations come

into being, since (the former) do not determine (the latter)'. It

is true, not things but (semiotic) objects do determine

capitalism in this sense.

22 For an enlightening discussion on the two senses of





"determine", 'logical and causal' in Peirce's definitions of sign

see J.Ransdell (1992), specifically his chapter "Peirce's

definition of the representation relation".

23 In the same fashion than Derrida's analysis of the

Saussurean metaphysical assumptions underlying the supposed

superiority of the spiritual Signified. The signifier is, in this

vision, only reified opacity, just like instituted society for

Castoriadis.

24 In his poem "There was a saviour" (Dylan Thomas, 1953).

25 Indeed, determinism implies that 'all that has been and

what is and what will be, what happens and will happen, is

fixed beforehand, conditioned and established, there cannot be

or happen anything but what was fixed, conditioned and

established beforehand', as Ferrater Mora (1980) defines it in

his dictionary of philosophy.

26 Houser (1989:91) quotes C.Dougherty on this point, and on

the identity of the practice of prescision and phenomenology.

27 Houser, op. cit. 93

28 Unless indicated all quotations in this section are from this

passage in the Collected papers, it dates from 1895.

29 "Doxa" meant not just common opinion, but also 'good

reputation or fame', according to commentator and translator

A. Tovar's (1953).

30 See Peirce (5.538) on the role of the imagination as

preparation for legitimate and efficient action.

31 Peirce seems to identify Secondness with varying degreesof the 'shock' of otherness or non-self: 'That shock which we

experience when anything particularly unexpected forces itself

upon our recognition... Low grades of this shock doubtless

accompany all unexpected perceptions; and every perception is

more or less unexpected' (1.332,emphasis mine).

32 The passage is quoted in M. Murphey (1961:83-85).

33 The context of these considerations on publicity from suchearly marketing period is quite interesting and central to

Peircean semiotic: the Pragmatic Maxim is introduced here.





34 His mother's muslin dress catches fire and Herbert puts it

out as if he had always done it. This must have impressed

Peirce: not only does he write about it in 1902 and 1903,

5.538, 5.487, respectively but he also changes the identity of

the victim: the second time it is a guest of the house.

35 For a full discussion on the political myth associated withJ. Batlle y Ordóñez see F. Andacht (1992).

36 This is how his opponents called him. See M. Vanger (1980)

37 The dictatorship lasted from 1973 to 1984.

38 On this point I draw many ideas from C. Perelli and J. Rial's

(1985) excellent analysis of the period.

39 A sociologist compares voting in Uruguay with the highest

expectation of the people, almost as if the election's result

were the outcome of a match of soccer between the two

traditional rival teams. See Solari (1965).

40 This is the mechanism of transvaluation. See J.J. Liszka

(1989, passim)

41 I agree with Balat's (1992:205) decision to adopt thisPeircean term to designate Firstness.

42 For a more developed analysis see "Chronicle of an

overannounced burial" in F. Andacht, (1989:37-56).

43 As in the legendary broadcast of O. Welles's War of theWorlds, lots of people actually called the TV station to find out

why the station had been closed. This took place in 1989, four

years after the return of democracy!

44 This strategy is part of the 'phatological dimension' (F.

Andacht 1992a), that is, all those aspects of semiosis

concerned with legitimizing the self in any kind of interaction.

45 See Liszka (1989:8-12) on the type of explanation afforded

by social sciences, opposed to the predictive nature of the

laws of natural sciences.

46 Peirce (2.199) makes the other two sciences 'depend on'

esthetics.





47 The term appears in P.Aubenque's (1962:498) masterful

exegesis of Aristotle's metaphysics: 'L'imitation

aristotélicienne n'est pas une relation descendante de modèle à

copie comme l'était l'imitation platonicienne, mais une

relation ascendante par laquelle l'être inférieur s'efforce de

réaliser ... un peu de la perfection qu'il aperçoit dans le terme

supérieur...'

48 Shapiro (1981) compares and combines in a subtle way

Saussure's central notion of value, with the Peircean

interpretant, in the light of Jakobson's markedness theory.

49 F. Andacht (1992a: 1470)

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