On the interdisciplinarity of semiotics
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Daina Teters
Daina Teters (b. 1963) is Professor for Cultural Semiotics and Philosophy at the Latvian Academy of Culture, Riga. Her scholarly interests include the methodology of science and semiotics of culture. Her most recent publications are “Is there any still unknowable strategy of seeing?” (2016), “Space as if it were empty: Emptiness” (2016), “Construction des lieux de vision et leur architecture” (2016), “Some peculiarities of verbalizing the concepts of center and periphery in the strategies of the avant-garde” (2014).
As is known, after its appearance each new theoretical paradigm offers an organizing framework of concepts and procedures that, for a time, provides compelling examples and fruitful research procedures in the field and, intriguingly, starts its own biography – always a unique self-thematization. In the case of semiotics, an excursion in the history of theoretical thought is highly desirable due to the fact that the birth of this theoretical innovation takes place not in an empty world, but in a specific contextual embedding, and this will lay the contextual foundation for further paradigms.
Starting from the late nineteenth century, as a result of a new and reflexive style of method discussions, at least three innovations have appeared:
Structural and disciplinary changes in science – the division of science into supposedly homogenous groups of the humanities and natural sciences (or Geisteswissenschaften vs. Naturwissenschaften).
Two new-orientations in thinking –a change of theoretical points of view or a turn towards a new subject language /linguistic turn/ and action /pragmatic turn/ with paths in each discipline,
Dissolution of disciplinary borders.
As a result, literary theory began to take root in philosophy and the history of human ideas; there appeared the first co-disciplines and co-methodologies, which paved the way for the possibility of both cultural thought based on literary texts and a new style of creating texts based on the borders of several disciplines and, eventually, an opportunity of expanding them. The blending of disciplines was most apparent in singularly literalized philosophy, sociology, or medicine; let us remember the works of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Simmel, Freud, or Vaihinger, and a bit later the neo-mythological language used by Wittgenstein or Mikhail Bakhtin’s semiotic philosophy.
This, one of the most radical turns in the history of thinking and theories, was affected by semiotics, or vice versa. This period marked the beginnings of two semiotic traditions that can be considered as ideological sisters of the turns mentioned above: Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic structuralism and Charles Sanders Peirce’s pragmatic theory of cognition versus semiotics. Saussure’s semiotics reflects orientation of the epoch towards deeper layers of cultural phenomena, in this case towards internal relationships hidden in the systems of signs, and heralds a transition from the holistic wholeness characteristic of substantial thinking or systemic thought to the understanding of the deeper structures of cultural phenomena created by mankind. In other words, in the middle of the twentieth century it became a methodological norm to see any identity in relation and to look for the hidden, relational logic, which cannot be read on the surface, but in the systems of cultural signs.
However, there is a problem encapsulated in this way; in the course of the development of knowledge, which became particularly acute in the second half of the twentieth century, there appeared fields – laughter, carnival, ruins, or the like – which were not covered by any disciplinary carpet, or there emerged phenomena that did not yield to the treatment of traditional methods and had to be thematized in a different context. Something had to be done about this situation, and it was possible only under the circumstances, namely, when the spatial concept of the disciplines emerged since the disciplinary body eventually gained border-crossing experience. Semiotics set the tone in this process, presenting much more mature features than might be expected from so new a science.
Then some doubts arose. Aren’t we standing at the cradle of a grown-up child? Perhaps the history of semiotics and consequently their specific character started earlier – when nobody referred to them as semiotics yet?
According to the Ancient Greeks, understanding and knowledge about the workings of nature are characterized by description, comparison, arrangement, and the abstraction of separate phenomena based on common notions, while knowledge about humans amounts to signs (sema) on a readable bodily surface (soma). Like everything in the world, the human is also a natural thing. The reading of the signs of a human being that refers to invisible processes occurring in the depth of his/her body can actually be regarded as proto-medicine, which singles out three different kinds of reading of signs: signs from the past (anamnesis), those that exist now (diagnosis) and those which, based on the current knowledge, can be expected in the future (prognosis).
As with the previous turning points, semiotics played an influential part in the philosophy of John Locke, who could afford pre-disciplinary freedom in the seventeenth century by joining philosophy, medicine, economics, politics, and, yes, also semiotics. Namely, he rescued the ancient discipline, which was once associated with reading symptoms on the surface of the human body, and included it in the triad of philosophical disciplines, at the same time giving it an opportunity to be born as a new emancipated science at the turn of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries.
When taking into account the pre-semiotic history of semiotics and its extraordinary abilities of extension, by adjusting to any new change in science and its disciplinary insensitivity towards borderlines, it is possible to foresee that it will serve as an interdisciplinary panacea in the future too. However, it is another question whether it will manage to preserve its self-identity.
About the author
Daina Teters (b. 1963) is Professor for Cultural Semiotics and Philosophy at the Latvian Academy of Culture, Riga. Her scholarly interests include the methodology of science and semiotics of culture. Her most recent publications are “Is there any still unknowable strategy of seeing?” (2016), “Space as if it were empty: Emptiness” (2016), “Construction des lieux de vision et leur architecture” (2016), “Some peculiarities of verbalizing the concepts of center and periphery in the strategies of the avant-garde” (2014).
© 2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Introduction to the Festschrift
- A semiotic way of being sixty
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- Introduction: semiotics is interdisciplinary: but how can you ensure interdisciplinarity is practiced?
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- The treasures of world semiotics
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- To what extent can it be argued that semiotics is an interdisciplinary methodology?
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- Westerners taste, arabs get drunk
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- The interdisciplinary languages of semiotics
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- Semiotics as an interdisciplinary methodology
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- On the interdisciplinarity of semiotics
- Contributions
- Semioticians reflecting on the interdisciplinary character of semiotics
- Contributions
- Why life presupposes semiosis
- Contributions
- How to encode and infer linguistic actions
- Contributions
- The Bakhtinian revolution and the i-other relation
- Contributions
- Communication-production and the right to non-functionality
- Contributions
- Metaphors, semiotics, and future studies
- Contributions
- The artist’s self-reflection: A pluralistic interpretation of the artist-characters in Eugene O’Neill’s plays
- Contributions
- On anti-identity construction and anti-modeling
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Introduction to the Festschrift
- A semiotic way of being sixty
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- Introduction: semiotics is interdisciplinary: but how can you ensure interdisciplinarity is practiced?
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- The treasures of world semiotics
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- To what extent can it be argued that semiotics is an interdisciplinary methodology?
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- Westerners taste, arabs get drunk
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- The interdisciplinary languages of semiotics
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- Semiotics as an interdisciplinary methodology
- Essays by Officers of the IASS
- On the interdisciplinarity of semiotics
- Contributions
- Semioticians reflecting on the interdisciplinary character of semiotics
- Contributions
- Why life presupposes semiosis
- Contributions
- How to encode and infer linguistic actions
- Contributions
- The Bakhtinian revolution and the i-other relation
- Contributions
- Communication-production and the right to non-functionality
- Contributions
- Metaphors, semiotics, and future studies
- Contributions
- The artist’s self-reflection: A pluralistic interpretation of the artist-characters in Eugene O’Neill’s plays
- Contributions
- On anti-identity construction and anti-modeling
