The interdisciplinary languages of semiotics

Semiotic studies in the East and West have attracted international attention and interdisciplinary involvement throughout the twentieth century and beyond. These studies boast participation of numerous groundbreaking figures of the likes of Charles Peirce, father-founder of modern semiotic studies, Victoria Welby, the mother-founder, the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, the biologist and “cryptosemiotician” Jakob von Uexküll, and again Lev Vygotsky, Thomas Sebeok, Roman Jakobson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Charles Morris, the Vienna Circle, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Juri M. Lotman, Umberto Eco, Julia Kristeva, etc.

Among the precursors, Lotman in 1964 inaugurated the world’s first Summer School in Semiotics, at the University of Tartu, along with the world’s first journal in semiotics, Trudy po znakovym sisteman (Sign system studies). In the West the International Association for Semiotic Studies was inaugurated in Paris five years later, in 1969, with its official mouthpiece, the journal Semiotica, directed by Sebeok – the most renowned semiotician of the twentieth century, from when it was founded through to his death. In 1956 Sebeok had already founded the Research Center for Language and Semiotic Studies in Bloomington. Like Sebeok, Lotman, leading figure of the Moscow-Tartu School, was not only a theoretician in his own right, but contributed enormously to organizational and editorial work for the advancement of interdisciplinary sign studies.

Semiotic research is firstly the quest for appropriate terminology to talk about signs. This quest accompanies the development of semiotics as a discipline right across the twentieth century and is pursued still today. An important example in this sense is provided by biosemiotic research (Favareau, 2010: 120).

Peircean semiotics is an important model for present day semioticians engaged in explaining the logic of sign relations. After Peirce, Morris took up the task of developing semiotic terminology in Foundations of a theory of signs (1938), developed in subsequent writings, including “Signs about signs about signs” (1948). In his discussion of the expression “biosemiotics”, Sebeok (2001a, b) also draws attention to the importance of terminological issues (now in Favareau, 2010: 223).

More than simply applying the same tools, or sharing a common terminological apparatus, we are describing the attempt at reinventing, modifying, and developing terminology and correlated concepts in order to favor the perception of new insights. A development in this direction is delineated by Augusto Ponzio with his essay of 1985 “Segni per parlare di segni / Signs to talk about signs” (now in 1990).

Paul Bouissac’s Encyclopedia of semiotics (1998), Winfried Nöth’s Handbook on semiotics (1990), Paul Cobley’s Routledge companion to linguistics and semiotics (2001), followed by his Routledge companion to semiotics (2010), and most recently Marcel’s Encyclopedia of media and communication (2013) all exemplify the community effort made by researchers in developing a suitable terminological apparatus and interdisciplinary vision able to account for the globality and dialogism of a multifaceted semiosic universe.

Sebeok (Morris’s student and reader of Uexküll’s works) has biology encounter semiotics in what he calls “global semiotics” (2001), an expression that sealed his interdisciplinary approach and legacy to the international community of researchers. A magistral expression of the global semiotic vision are the four volumes constituting Semiotik/Semiotics (Posner, Robering, Sebeok, 1997–2001).

The short-circuiting element between semiotics and biology is identified by Sebeok in the notion of model (Deely, 2007), recovered from the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics. Here this notion is applied to verbal language understood as primary modeling while nonverbal cultural modeling is described as secondary modeling. Sebeok connects the Moscow-Tartu notion of model to Uexküll’s notion of Umwelt, freeing the former from glottologic and anthropological restrictions and attributing it to all living beings as the a priori of all forms of communication. The notion of model is used for primary modeling, but unlike the Moscow-Tartu school it does not indicate verbal language. Instead, modeling is described as the device through which all species-specifically conditioned living beings construct their own worlds: what Uexküll calls Lebenswelt, the subjective correlate of the Umwelt, “world” (Uexküll, 1909).

This notion underlines the condition of interconnectedness between organism and environment, subject and environment. It follows that private and subjective experiences are prone to scientific investigation. Though contemporary biosemioticians do not all agree on the best theoretical framework for biosemiotics, major exponents such as Jesper Hoffmeyer, Kalevi Kull, Søren Brier, and Claus Emmeche not only agree that subjective experience is a genuinely existing and biologically instantiated set of agent-object relations, but that it is an organizing principle in the co-evolution of interdependent living systems (Favareau, 2010: 88).

Considering his use of language and argumentation, rich with metaphors and associations interconnecting different fields of knowledge and experience, Uexküll’s approach recalls the “translative method” theorized by Welby. Like the philosopher Bakhtin who translates such concepts as “chronotope” from the language of biology and “polyphony” from music into the language of philosophy, Uexküll interprets-translates findings in biology in light of the language of the arts – music, poetry, etc. – in a relation of mutual enhancement. He uses counterpoint theory (polyphonic point and counterpoint) as a model in his analysis of the relation between subject and object in the “subjective universe”.

With reference to anthroposemiosis semiotics today developed in the direction of semioethics (Petrilli & Ponzio, 2003, 2010; Petrilli, 2014) knows that signs are pervaded with values, and are never neutral whether in ordinary life or in the different languages that study the latter (scientific languages) or depict it (artistic languages).

As illustrated in the collective volumes Linguaggi (Petrilli, 2004) and most recently in Scienze dei linguaggi e linguaggi delle scienze (Petrilli, 2015), which develop the vision of interdisciplinariness and its languages outlined by Ponzio, for example in Il linguaggio e le lingue (2015[2002]), the semiotic approach recognizes and fosters interconnectedness, intertextuality, interference, imitation, derivation, contamination, dialogue among the different languages of the sign sciences (linguistics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, psychoanalysis, logic, semiotics, philosophy of languages), on one hand, and the different languages of the physical-natural and human sciences, on the other, transferring the language of biology into semiotics (today biosemiotics) and vice versa; the language of physics into neopositivism, or “logical empiricism”; the language of economics (marginalism with the School of Lausanne) into linguistics; the paradigm of phonology into cultural anthropology, and so forth.

Contributions to semiotic research from different disciplinary areas and trends reveal the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue, showing the way to new forms of collaboration for the sake of progress in science and understanding.