A Labor of Love and Friendship

1 Introduction

Thomas Albert Sebeok and Semiotics is a booklet of 52 pages, written and published by John Deely during his period as Visiting Professor at New Bulgarian University, Sofia, in 2005. Having been his student during another of his visiting professorships, a couple of years earlier in Helsinki, I know that Professor Deely is not new to making publications out of his lectures, in the format of short “pamphlets” that can be read in few hours (in symbolic counterbalance with monumental works such as Four Ages of Understanding, almost as if to prove that this “department store” offers books for all sizes, from S to XXL).

That the contents of the book here examined are intended for a lecture (or anyway for “public speaking”), is clear from various circumstantial references within the text, particularly temporal ones: “We gather this late afternoon…” (2005: 3: the opening of the book); “I will not have time this evening to say all…” (5), and so forth. And, Deely being Deely, an inside-joke referred to his gracious host in Bulgaria, Kristian Bankov, also appears on page 11 in the form of that “slow by slow” that my friend Kristian has occasionally employed in place of the slightly more common “little by little”. Additional references to Bankov as a scholar (particularly his “razor”) occur on page 17.

Furthermore, and to be fair, it must also be said that the material displayed in this booklet is, for the most part, available in numerous other publications by Deely. The bulk of the book consists of two, well-distinguished, parts, implemented by two brief extras. Starting from the latter, we have a preface (3–8) called “Sebeok and semiotics”, which has the main purpose of launching the themes later developed in Part I and Part II, and a short appendix (39–40), called “Summing up”, which, in all sincerity, seems mostly like an attempt to create (or, in fact, confirm) the no-nonsense, stubborn, straightforward, principled, opinionated and all-American image that Sebeok projected among his peers and colleagues. An undated text written by Sebeok himself and referring to his undergraduate years (in the early 1940s), “Summing up” is a recollection of Sebeok’s stormy conversation with his Dean of Humanities at Chicago University, Dr. Richard McKeon. Sebeok’s closing line to that conversation (“Mr. McKeon, you are a son of a bitch!”) indeed proves that the great semiotician was basically wrong when, a few months before passing away, during his last plenary lecture at the Summer School of Semiotics in Imatra, Finland, he stated that the most suitable actor to play his role in an imaginary biopic would have been Bela Lugosi. The likes of Telly Savalas or Yul Brynner (also for undeniable aesthetic advantages in the tricological department) would have been more up to the task.

As for the two important sections that constitute the main body of the book, we have Part I, called “A glance at the development as a whole”, and Part II, called “The biography and role of Sebeok within the 20th century development”. To these, I shall devote my review.

2 “A glance at the development as a whole”

Part I is an account of the development of semiotics during the 20th century (plus Peirce’s pre-inputs in the 19th), until Sebeok’s first major contribution to the field, in 1963. Deely approaches such development (which “was neither linear nor smooth – revolutions seldom are”: 12) within the framework of the semiotic school he and Sebeok openly belong/ed to: the philosophical one inaugurated by Peirce (as opposed to the Saussurean linguistic one), which would not really take off in mainstream semiotics before the late 1980s. As a consequence, Deely’s interpretation of the discipline has a slight Hegelian flavor, with a “history travels from semiology to semiotics” attitude. Far from seeing Saussure as an “obstacle” to the field – the Swiss linguist being “certainly right in his pointing out that the thematic study of signs did not exist in modern intellectual culture, but had a right to existence and a place staked out in advance” (13) – Deely nevertheless makes no mystery of the fact that “[Saussure’s] own proposal for launching sign studies so radically misconceived and distorted the ‘place marked out in advance’ that it took about nine of the 20th century’s decades to begin to commence to start to straighten things out” (13).

Yet, the die was cast, and the soil was fertile for a science of signs that would challenge the modern notion of knowable reality as humanly constructed (a breakthrough that Deely identifies with Peirce’s proposal of mind-dependent and –independent semiotic categories in 1867, and that he calls the beginning of “post-modernity”). Saussure and Peirce were moving on parallel lines, and while the former was developing a certain “institutional familiarity” for semiotic notions and approaches within the academic community (however inexact or incomplete they may have been), Peirce was operating in the underground of academia, shaping an organic, complete, identity of the field:

[…] where Saussure began with a stipulated definition arbitrarily restricting signs to the human sphere and severing their connection with the motivating history of the sign users as embodied in their language (…), Peirce began with a descriptive definition based on observation rather than on a specialized and artificial analysis turning the study of signs into yet one more ‘science’ in the very modern sense that the need for interdisciplinary approaches, already even in Saussure’s time, was emerging as a reaction to.

(Deely, 2005: 16)

In doing so, Peirce was also inclusive of the Latin scholastics, finding that “his proposal for descriptively defining signs in terms of an irreducibly triadic relation” (18) had foundations in pre-modern thought (which, as we know, is a crucial point for a scholar, John Deely, who made of the rediscovery and semioticization of Augustine, Poinsot, Aquinas, and others, his arguably most solid contribution to contemporary semiotics).

In his process of historicization of semiotics, Deely sees a connection between the progressive replacement of the once-fashionable term “semiology” with “semiotics” as words (and relative usage among scholars and institutions), and the increasing popularity of the Peircean, philosophical, not-restricted-to-human theoretical school over the Saussurean-logocentric one. In a paragraph aptly titled “What’s in a name?”, Deely indeed sees Greimas solely as the only major semiotician who, at the same time, kept on employing the term “semiology” when it was rapidly going out of fashion, and remained true to his Saussu-rean matrix. While this is an absolutely legitimate inference (one on which Deely has been insisting for a long time), I may take the liberty to raise a tiny objection, here, as I do not see a distinction that is so neat and a connection that is so strong. Partly because of my passport (Italy, I would argue, along with France, was and remains the main territory of “semiology”), I witness repeated cases of Peircean (or at least Peirce-inspired) colleagues who still prefer to call their field of inquiry “semiologia” or, on the other side of the Alps, “semiologie”. And, conversely, that fortress of Greimassian (i.e. Saussure-inspired) scholarship that is the Greimas Centre in Vilnius University, Lithuania, adopts the word “semiotics” (semiotika) in all their outlets, despite the fact that Lithuanian language perfectly contemplates the word “semiologija” too. In other words, my opinion, here (which of course counts for nothing else than my opinion), is that there is a visible terminological progression from “semiology” to “semiotics”, and a slightly less-visible (but still recognizable) transition from anthropocentric to biocentric semiotics, however a) the pace of such movements is neither regular nor reciprocally-coherent, and b) while a connection of terms and schools may exist, it may not be as solid as claimed in this and Deely’s other writings.

3 “The biography and role of Sebeok within the 20th century development”

Now that Sebeok has entered the scene, this part focuses specifically on his life and career, in an attempt to contextualize his biographical events (particularly his formative years) within the development of his theoretical paradigm and the role played within the bigger picture of semiotics in the last century. Once again, the milestone is 1963: just like jazz history can be articulated into a before and an after bebop, or R.E.M.’s career into (an interesting) before and (a boring) after “Losing My Religion”, Deely suggests that the appearance of the by-now-legendary “Communication in Animals and Men” (Sebeok, 1963) is the actual watershed in Sebeok’s career (and in semiotics as a whole, as we have seen in the previous part). The Sebeok B.C. (Before “Communication...”) is the young Hungarian who goes to study in Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1936, emigrates to the United States in 1937, studies linguistics at Chicago University in 1939 and anthropological linguistics at Princeton in 1942 (where he also meets Roman Jakobson), and finally spends his “priceless period of freedom” (33) at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1960–1961.

The new Sebeok is incubated during the Stanford period, devoted, for the most part, to deepening his knowledge in biology and animal communication. The bases for that 1963 article published in the journal Language and the whole work that followed it are set in the Californian city. From this point on, and certainly because of the constraints of the “booklet” format, Deely decides to single out only three critical topics within the vast and eclectic contribution that Sebeok made to semiotic inquiry. The first is a reproposition of the debate between semiology and semiotics (the “logically proper name”), on which we already commented in the previous paragraph. The second focuses on Sebeok’s inputs on the systematics (or, if we like, taxonomy) of semiotic areas. After coining “zoosemiotics” in 1963, Sebeok notoriously established the term “anthropo-semiotics” in 1968 and borrowed from Martin Krampen the term “phytosemiotics”, producing a triad that characterized his “further thesis that sign-science and life-science are co-extensive” (Deely, 2005: 36), a triad that, as we know, will be later implemented by Sebeok himself and other scholars, by considering also micosemiosis and the various endosemiosic and/or microsemiosic processes. By the early 1990’s, biosemiotics was born: its difficult beginnings and related debates are also illustrated in this booklet, on pages 37–38. Finally, Deely briefly comments on the very last theoretical project that Sebeok launched before his passing: global semiotics, and – once again – the related following debate:

This debate, by involving through semiosis ways revelative of something of nature itself as it is “on its own terms”, turns out to have carried modernity beyond itself as a distinct philosophical epoch. The man who, more than any other, shaped his development of discourse and the terms of its questions, as we have now seen, was Thomas Sebeok.

(Deely, 2005: 38)

4 Conclusions

To conclude, it is perhaps worth mentioning that the reader who approaches this book in the hope of finding a Sebeok “compendium” is likely to be disappointed. A compendium it is not. Nor, obviously (given the size) is it a reader or a companion. Such work is yet to be written, in relation to the great Hungarian-born semiotician, and he certainly deserves one. What we have already are two comprehensive bibliographical surveys, by Deely himself and by Jean Umiker-Sebeok (this booklet introduces and references them on pages 29 and 48 respectively).

What the reader may expect, and benefit from, by reading this book, is a work of contextualization of Sebeok within the panorama of semiotics, in both the theoretical and the historical sense. As we mentioned biopics, at Sebeok’s prompting, at the beginning of this review, we can safely say that the filmic equivalent of this book would not indeed be a biographical movie, of the type of Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi or Clint Eastwood’s Bird. This is the type of “movie” where the background is a rival to the foreground, so that the landscape’s details are as vivid and significant as the protagonist’s. Here Sebeok is the protagonist. However, the surroundings are visible too: we are forced to wait for the second half of the movie in order for the specific focus on Sebeok to enter the narrative. Bernardo Bertolucci’s approach to historical movies may certainly provide more appropriate comparisons, here: I am thinking about instances like 1900 (Sebeok’s century, as Deely himself has it on page 38) and The Last Emperor (hopefully not of ice-cream)

And, most of all, the reader should expect a labor of love and friendship. Thomas Albert Sebeok and Semiotics is a tribute that John Deely pays to a man who has been his friend and main inspiration, and whose steps he has followed in more than one line of his own research path. His determination to preserve Seboek’s heritage has been visible in many instances, mostly scholarly ones, but the personal side of this relationship has always been symbiotic with the professional one. No better example than the following one, I believe, can represent such a symbiosis. The context, once again, is the Summer School of Semiotics in Imatra. In 2003, a session in memory of Sebeok is organized by Deely, and held in the presence of Sebeok’s widow, an excellent scholar herself, Jean Umiker. Deely delivers a rich presentation, reading a text that is mostly equivalent to Part II of this book. At some point, with no particular reason (nor any especially “personal” passage in the presentation), his voice breaks into a trembling, emotional falsetto. John holds back the tears (Jean does not) and continues reading with this unstable timbre. Towards the end, as Sebeok’s work is listed in a crescendo of groundbreaking achievements in semiotics, Deely stops reading for a moment, having reached an emotional culmination that is now impossible to handle without a break. He gently hits the table with his fist, mimicking a gesture that is normally performed in a much louder way, and lifts his gaze towards the audience, or maybe a bit higher: “What a great man Tom was – too bad he died”.

Gathering his composure, he finishes the paper with no other manifestation of fragility, leaving in the audience the indelible stamp of the story of two men, filled with great scholarship and profound humanity.

Both that lecture and this booklet finished with the same words:

Thus was the 20th century – the century over the course of which semiotics emerged from the shadows of philosophy’s past and from modernity’s margins to define a new mainstream of intellectual development beyond the oppositions of realism and idealism –indeed Sebeok’s century: the century whose beginnings in the matter of signs found a decisive clarity through its outcome, orchestrated by Sebeok as Maestro Signorum under the anomalous coinage “semiotics”. Tom stood as a first among equals as the 20th century gave way to the postmodern future.

(Deely, 2005: 38)