Presence in absentia: in memory of Göran Sonesson

1 Themes and background of the present volume

The present thematic issue is one of Göran Sonesson’s brainchildren. Göran had contributed to a 2018 collective volume on concepts of “relevance” edited by Hisashi Nasu and myself (Sonesson 2018). In 2019, Göran and I started thinking of ways to set up what he called “a research network on the integration of different notions of relevance.” Organizing a conference panel on the topic seemed like the best option, but we could not find a suitable venue for a long time, not least due to the coronavirus pandemic that began the following year and largely forbade any physical co-presence among scholars. In 2021, Göran suggested submitting a panel proposal for the Fifteenth World Congress of Semiotics of the IASS-AIS to be held in August 2022. “That,” he wrote in his email, “seems sufficiently far in the future for us to hope that it will be a real conference, with scholars present in Thessaloniki.”

In the meantime, Göran (Sonesson 2021) began combining the phenomenological problem of “relevance” as discussed by Alfred Schutz and Aron Gurwitsch in the 1940s and 1950s with the semiotic concept of “encyclopedia” that Umberto Eco developed from the 1970s onwards (Eco 2014 [2007]: ch. 1). This idea harked back to Göran’s early efforts to bring together semiotics and phenomenology. The use of signs – for the time being, in a narrow, everyday sense of “signs” – is embedded in processes of meaning making that include highly dynamic mechanisms of attention, cognition, or action. Schutz (1966 [1957]), to whom Göran had referred early on (Sonesson 1988), was the first phenomenologist to suggest a general notion of “relevance” to describe the mechanisms in question (also see Strassheim 2022). The embeddedness of signs within a wider dynamic of meaning, Göran pointed out, affects not only, e.g., pictures, but even signs highly regulated in their use by seemingly autonomous codes, such as words. This is where Eco’s “encyclopedia” came in as an attempt to conceive of semantics in terms not of rigid, logically structured “dictionary” definitions, but of an open and dynamic knowledge that includes regularities of meaning but remains sensitive to the concrete situation of use, as well as to ongoing changes and updates.

Edmund Husserl offered a concept which (also given Göran’s engagement with cultural semiotics) seemed ideal for exploring the relation between phenomenology and semiotics: “lifeworld.” To be used and/or understood, signs must be experienced by somebody, and phenomenology is the systematic study of experience. When we focus on the fundamental and universal structures of experience, the world as experienced, the “lifeworld,” has only a singular form. In this sense, all human experiencers live in one and the same lifeworld, and all signs they produce and interpret function within it. Conversely, experience as we know it is by necessity structured by signs. A major reason for this is that the human lifeworld exists in the essentially social mode of “living together” (Husserl 1970 [1954]: 108), as a community of experiencers, and signs allow us to form, shape, and navigate such a community. Since signs evolve over time and differ across groups, the world is experienced in a plurality of historical and cultural forms, and in this sense, some phenomenologists speak of different “lifeworlds” in the plural.

Against this background, the theme of the 2022 World Congress of Semiotics, “Semiotics in the Lifeworld,” seemed perfect for our panel proposal, and as Göran had hoped, it was a “real conference, with scholars present in Thessaloniki.” This was in fact the first time I met Göran; we had until then only communicated in writing. Our panel included all the contributors to the present volume, although not all of them could ultimately come to Thessaloniki. Göran suggested the panel title: “How to build a lifeworld: In-between relevance and the encyclopaedia.” The panel abstract was largely by Göran, with a few changes and additions suggested by me:

Acts of meaning-making and communication can only succeed because they can rely on a background of things taken for granted. Some of these presuppositions are part of the invariant structure of the Lifeworld, as Edmund Husserl has observed, while others characterize particular socio-cultural lifeworlds, and yet others form part of the singular situation in which a particular act occurs. While such resources allow acts of meaning-making to happen and take shape, they are reproduced and changed in turn by those acts. There have been various, partly overlapping, propositions to account for these different kinds of meaning resources antecedent to the act, as well as resulting from it: Examples, within the phenomenological tradition, include Husserl’s notions of sedimentation and passive synthesis and Alfred Schutz’ systems of relevance and schemes of interpretation, and, in a spirit closer to analytical philosophy and cognitive science, Dan Sperber’s and Deidre Wilson’s relevance theory, as well as the notion of Encyclopaedia conceived in a rhizomatic form within the semiotic theory of Umberto Eco. All these proposals seem to be guided by a common endeavour to present the resources at the disposal of the speaker-hearer, or, more generally, the addresser-addressee of any semiotic act, as being something much more complex and dynamic than a lexicon. The aim of the present panel is to consider these different proposals and perhaps others, and thus to determine to what extent they can be combined, or whether one of them better accounts for the patterns and aspects of meaning pre-existing to the act which are then modified and enriched by it.

Upon returning from Greece, Göran and I decided to write a proposal for a special issue of Semiotica based on our panel (but with the US spelling “encyclopedia” replacing Göran’s British “encyclopaedia”), and all the original panel participants agreed to contribute extended abstracts. However, Göran’s messages arrived more and more slowly, and he mentioned hospital treatments and complications that kept him from working. Only when, after another long pause, his wife Ana Tejera Sonesson emailed me, in March 2023, to inform me that Göran had passed away three days earlier did I realize how grave his illness had been and that it had surely been present already in Thessaloniki, where Göran had not given any sign of it, at least none that I noticed.

By the time of Göran’s passing, the special issue proposal was largely finished but had not yet been finalized. Since this project was one of Göran’s very last and since it echoed longstanding interests of his, I asked the contributors whether they would continue the plan in Göran’s honor and with him as a posthumous guest editor, which Semiotica’s editors-in-chief confirmed was possible under the circumstances. Everyone agreed to be on board, and the final proposal passed the journal’s review.^[1]

2 Göran Sonesson’s absent paper

The special issue was to contain a contribution by Göran which, given his central role in the project, would have formed the heart of the volume. Sadly, due to his illness, he was not able to work on his planned article anymore, as a search on his computer confirmed a year after his passing.^[2] Nevertheless, we have some clues as to what he might have written.

Our first clue is of course the talk Göran gave at the panel in Thessaloniki, entitled “How to build a lifeworld: The gap between the Encyclopaedia and the Porphyrian tree spanned by sedimentation.” Göran elaborated some ideas of this talk in a journal paper (Sonesson 2022) bearing almost the same subtitle, now introduced as a “Phenomenology of semiosis.” He also suggested this paper (along with Sonesson 2018) for the thematic bibliography of the special issue proposal.

Among other things, Göran (Sonesson 2022) discusses phenomenology as an epistemological framework for theoretical and empirical research in semiotics, reconstructing some ideas behind what the early Husserl (1994 [1980]) explicitly called a “semiotic” and building on them. He also defends Husserl against Derrida’s criticism of a “metaphysics of presence,” stressing how for Husserl, presence and absence interweave in both signs and meaning. The paper then turns to the debate around the concept of relevance between Schutz and Gurwitsch and shows how Eco’s encyclopedia hypothesis and a phenomenology of relevance – with a focus on Husserl’s concept of “sedimentation” – can work together to help us understand the situation of “enunciation.” In keeping with his project of a “phenomenology of semiosis” that includes signs within a more general concept of “meaning,” Göran uses “enunciation” in a wide sense ranging from simple acts of perception to the far more complex acts of communication. Every act of enunciation is, on the hand, guided by culturally and individually “sedimented” meaning patterns which include semantic meaning more narrowly understood but go beyond it. On the other hand, the act of enunciation selectively reactivates the sediments; it can reaffirm or question them, creatively transcend them or lead to lasting changes as part of the dynamic, open-ended process of semiosis.

Our second clue is the extended abstract Göran wrote for the special issue proposal at the end of November 2022. The abstract, entitled “From adumbration to sign by way of relevancy. Further approximations to the phenomenology of semiosis” indicates that he wanted to continue his argument, focusing on the relation between signs and meaning and applying his conception to concrete problems in cultural and pictorial semiotics. Again, I quote in full Göran’s abstract (which we slightly edited together). It would not be much use to speculate about how he would have executed his plan. But we can find blueprints and building blocks in earlier publications to which he alludes in the abstract; I have therefore ventured some suggestions in square brackets.

From his first work onwards, Edmund Husserl was continuously concerned to characterize the notion of sign. In a recent paper [Sonesson 2022], I have nevertheless shown that he failed to differentiate it clearly from a wider notion of meaning. Indeed, in phenomenology the notion of meaning is presented as being much broader than that of sign. Meaning starts out manifesting itself at least already at the level of perception – and, if Husserl’s late work, and that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, is taken into account, even at some anterior level of sentience. Although, within the other phenomenological tradition, that of Charles Sanders Peirce, his present-day followers keep maintaining that all meaning is of the nature of signs, Peirce himself complained repeatedly that the term sign was “too narrow” and even “injurious” with respect to the broad notion of meaning which he aimed to characterize [cf. Sonesson 2017, 2019]. It will be convenient to adopt Peirce’s alternative term, semiosis, for such a broad notion of meaning. From a phenomenological point of view, the fundamental task therefore becomes to discover in what way signs are based on semiosis and still add something specific to this general sense of meaning. In this paper, I will suggest that we can arrive at such a specification by treating relevancy in the sense of Alfred Schütz as constituting an intermediary layer of sedimentation. The latter term should here be understood in the way characterized in Husserl’s later work, as the persisting layer of meaning left by earlier accomplished acts of meaning, which creates the foundation for later acts, allowing them to make sense. Whether these sedimentations are genetic or generative, in Husserl’s sense, that is, due to acts accomplished by myself in my earlier life or to acts of preceding generations, they constitute the building blocks of the general structures of the Lifeworld or of particular socio-cultural lifeworlds. As I have suggested in some recent papers [Sonesson 2021, 2022], Schütz’s notion of relevancy may be given a more specific sense by being compared to Umberto Eco’s idea of the encyclopaedia as opposed to the dictionary, in particular if you delve deeper into the background of these notions in linguistic theory. This should help to explore two (in fact connected) conundrums which I encountered already in my early work: First, what is the difference of perceiving a cube and a die (both corresponding to “Würfel” in Husserl’s example) [cf. Sonesson 2010, 2012]? Second, what is really the difference, in Husserl’s analysis of the picture sign, between the picture subject and the picture object, once we distinguish both of them from the picture referent [cf. Sonesson 1989: 270–281]?

Göran had used the example of cube and die (both translating as “Würfel” in German) before (Sonesson 2012) to pry apart the kind of meaning that constitutes objects of perception as such (the cube as a material thing of a certain shape), which were Husserl’s preferred example, and more complex cultural objects, including signs proper (the die not simply as a cube, but as something that is used in various games, bears dot patterns indicating numbers, may function as a symbol of chance, etc.). Complaining that neither Peirce nor Saussure had defined what a sign is, Göran developed his own definition. One element of his proposal is that a sign – a die, a word, a picture – relates presence with absence. The “content” of the sign is experienced less directly than its “expression,” but the content is what is really at stake. Similarly, the “referent” in the real world is even further from the expression, but it is usually even more in focus than the sign content. Perceptual meaning lacks this complex internal differentiation. Nevertheless, it also relates presence with absence. Acts of perception are motivated by culturally ingrained patterns of meaning, and along such lines, any present perception points beyond itself towards other, past or possible perceptions, and towards other acts, including acts that involve sign use. Moreover, acts of perception are highly selective; following the established patterns of meaning, perception cuts out “relevant” aspects from a reality that always exceeds our experience of it and that may forever elude us. Göran often invoked such open problems, which once again enjoin the fates of semiotics and phenomenology, of the relation between our experience, mediated as it is by sign systems and patterns of meaning, and a putative reality beyond it.

3 Overview of the contributions

These open problems, as well as many other themes of Göran’s work, are also reflected in the contributions to the present special issue. The ten pieces by eleven scholars, while connected in their objects and approaches, have been ordered into four strands according to the level or focus of their analysis.

(1) The first strand (“Lifeworldly foundations”) contains three articles addressing fundamental questions of what the lifeworld is, how presence and absence are intertwined in it, and how scholars can approach its phenomena.

Igor Klyukanov understands the lifeworld as “Being” immediately lived together and argues that science can only view the continuity of this lifeworld through the lens of discrete forms. He distinguishes four such perspectives and relates them to groups of disciplines that approach the lifeworld in terms of mutually complementing types of meaning-making resources, each with a method of analysis that fits it best. His four-way schema correlates “natural science” with conversation analysis, “social science” with discourse analysis, “cultural science” with textual hermeneutic analysis, and finally, “philosophy” with a contemplative, critical analysis.

Claudio Paolucci opposes any claims, within phenomenology broadly understood, that the lifeworld can grant us an intuitive perception of the things themselves, or the immediate presence of a being behind or within the phenomena that “shows itself.” Instead, he argues for a semiotic concept of lifeworld based on the phenomenology that Peirce called “phaneroscopy,” according to which the environment we live in is constituted throughout by interpretants. Signs and sign-like relations of a primarily categorical and discursive character mediate our experience and thus constitute a “semiotic lifeworld” based on “saying” rather than “showing.”

Benjamin Stuck presents a phenomenological analysis, based on Husserl and Schutz and in dialogue with Sonesson, of how presence and absence are interrelated, through “appresentation,” in different types of signs and in meaning more generally. The various configurations at play, he argues, allow us to inhabit and navigate, together with others, a lifeworld that is socially organized and culturally articulated. Moreover, the processes at play allow us to experience our everyday lifeworld as a whole that contains within it multiple and mutually incompatible “realities,” such as the realities of religion, dreams, or science.

(2) The two articles in the second strand (“Focusing on relevance”) concentrate on the problem of why and how we select certain meaning resources rather than others in a concrete situation within the lifeworld.

Douglas Niño presents a framework for conceiving of the generation of meaning as an ongoing process embedded with goal-directed action. Combining the “Practical Logic of Cognitive Systems” developed by Gabbay and Woods with Peircean semiotics and Sonesson’s use of the lifeworld concept, he argues that human agents interacting with their environment produce meaning in the situation at hand, with a view to their goals, and with the aim of efficiently using available resources. These resources notably include semantically or culturally stabilized patterns of sign use, which sediment in the form of “embodied habits.”

Jan Strassheim relates relevance to the organic basis of human and non-human life. Building on Schutz’s phenomenology, he describes relevance as fundamental to our lifeworld and our stance towards reality. He characterizes human relevance by a tension, exemplified in language use, between the “closedness” and “openness” of meaning. Building on Helmuth Plessner’s “philosophical biology,” he argues that this tension unfolds on the “levels” of plants, animals, and humans in a way that allows us to distinguish the human lifeworld from the worlds of other lifeforms while recognizing its continuity with them.

(3) The third strand (“Encyclopedia in the spotlight”) comprises two pieces focusing their investigation on the dynamic and situated nature of semantics.

Filomena Diodato explores the idea of “semantic fields” as a middle ground that transcends the opposition, widespread in current semantics, between sign systems as structures closed in upon themselves and an unrestricted holism of context. Arguing against persistent misconceptions of structuralism, she proposes a structural outlook inspired by Tullio De Mauro and combines it with concepts from a phenomenologically oriented semiotics (especially Sonesson’s). She thus arrives at a “local holism” of meaning in which semantic knowledge and “relevance” are systematically stabilized while remaining dynamic and sensitive to the concrete situation of use.

Alice Orrù presents a case study of how the meaning of the word race and its cognates in several languages changed and branched out over the centuries, covering horses, property, and biological distinctions, as well as cultural, ethnic or personal characterizations of people. The “liquidity” displayed by the “semantic sphere” around this lexeme, she argues, escapes even an “inter-dictionarial” analysis and instead requires the late Eco’s understanding of the “encyclopedia” as a rhizomatic system that takes on contingent local shapes and reflects the changing and interconnected character of the lifeworld.

(4) The final strand (“Building a lifeworld”) consists of three contributions that concentrate on specific dimensions in which culturally articulated worlds are maintained or changed.

Boris Gubman and Karina Anufrieva focus on the historical dimension by combining hermeneutical, semiotic, and analytic thought. They stress the role of historical narratives, structurally similar to literary and even fictional narratives, in how a culture interprets itself by linking its present to its past in specific ways. Historical narratives are thus seen to be a crucial hermeneutical resource which, interacting with everyday language and encyclopedic knowledge, reacting to unpredictable “events” and sometimes clashing with rival narratives, can both stabilize and unsettle, unify and pluralize processes of meaning-making within a shared cultural world.

Rafael G. Lenzi investigates the structure of deliberate deception. Analyzing examples of professional advice taken from the CIA’s recently declassified, Cold War-era Manual of Trickery and Deception, he uses narrative semiotics and phenomenology to show how successful spies manage to remain hidden or to draw attention to themselves, to infiltrate groups and exfiltrate individuals, or to secretly exchange information in public. By exploiting sedimented meaning on the part of others and by navigating several cultures and narrative frames at once, expert tricksters can use the dynamic and plurality of the lifeworld to their own ends.

Filippo Silvestri contemplates the algorithmic structures that have become part of our everyday lives, mostly via the internet, and contrasts them with human communication. He argues that by measuring and channeling our online behavior, algorithms, the environments they create, and the networks they support make us reproduce a repetitive and restrictive order of relevance that can obstruct our actual tasks and interests such as research or problem-solving. Relevance as conceived to describe human language use, he contains, is fundamentally different from relevance as produced by the artificial “language” of a computer system.

4 Closing remarks

The articles in this special issue, as well as the authors present in it through their contributions, collectively point towards the very present absence of Göran Sonesson. The group composed of these eleven scholars was brought together by Göran, who had the idea of a thematic conference panel and special issue and found ways to realize them. Most of the pieces explicitly engage in a continuing dialogue with Göran, discussing his ideas or building on them. The present editorial does so quite obviously, and although it had to be published under my name, as Göran can no longer sign off on it, it would not have been written without him and indeed, with the two abstracts I have quoted in full, it consists partly of text written by him.

Hence, the existence of the present special issue confirms two points that Göran liked to stress. First, the interplay of presence and absence involved in meaning making, especially in the kind of meaning making that becomes possible through signs, has a crucially social dimension. Not only is our meaning making related to other individuals, groups, or cultures, whose perspectives we can only ever approximate through communication. Our very own meaning resources include the lingering presence of people no longer with us who left their marks on the meaning we make and the way we make it.

Second, and relatedly, the meanings we make in fields like semiotics and phenomenology, returning to old questions and giving new answers, criticizing earlier thoughts or expanding upon them, are part on an enterprise that connects generations of scholars and that can make real progress – even though its results always remain provisional. “There is no end to the work: but, as in all scientific endeavors, we always seem to get a little closer to the truth” (Sonesson 2012: 212–213). In the name of all contributors, I would like to dedicate this special issue to the memory of Göran Sonesson.^[3]