Somehow, I am in here, now, in this sign, that is me, that I am,
where there is neither inside nor outside, neither here nor there,
neither then nor now....
Floyd Merrell
1
Chinese Translation
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Yes indeed. What is semiotics anyway? On occasion I hear this question from working class people in my community, Lafayette, Indiana, when they ask me what I teach at Purdue. Most often I tell them I teach "Latin American culture," and escape the need of further clarification. But some times I blurt out "semiotics," and I am met with a wrinkled brow and that puzzling question. There is the "other" community across the Wabash River, West Lafayette, where Purdue University finds itself and where almost everybody is a professional or a professor and hence properly "refined." Many of those enlightened souls are not very comfortable with the term "semiotics" either. But, of course, they would never admit it. Here in Lafayette, in contrast, chances are a person will have few qualms about what s/he doesn't know.
At any rate, whenever someone on my side of the river asks me what I teach at Purdue, I customarily skirt the issue by responding "Latin American culture." I answer the query the way I do in all honesty, I would hope. It is true that I teach "Latin American Culture." I also teach Spanish American literature and semiotics and literary theory. However, "Latin American Culture" usually brings a knowing nod of approval without further questions asked--after all, we all think we know what "culture" is, don't we? Then we can get on with more interesting topics such as the weather, absurd things politicians say and do, recent basketball scores, and such.
Actually, semiotics, from the broadest possible vantage point, is so monumentally complex as to defy the imagination. It is something like St. Augustine's time: we all know what semiotics is without really knowing that we know it, without being able explicitly to describe it. We know it because we do it. We live and breathe it. We are in it. We are it. Well, then, if semiotics comes so natural for us all, then, once more the question: Why can't we just say it?
A few years ago I wrote a textbook on semiotics specifically designed for an introduction to semiotics I often teach. It took on the label Peirce's Semiotics NOW: A Primer (1995b). The problem is that it still contained vestiges of pompous professorial talk. I sensed that it didn't serve as a legitimate introduction. It had resisted my desire to present semiotics in simple terms by avoiding much academese and esoteric jargon. More recently, I tried to do it right, and failed, and tried again, and ... and I gave up. For about a week. Then I decided that at least a scattering of special terms was necessary. So I started there, beginning with "Zero," then proceeding to "One, Two, and Three" (see Merrell 2000). And the integers could go on and on. My story begins as simply as that.
"A mere counting game of three numbers?," comes the query.
Figure 1
Yes. No more, no less. It's like that example, dear to anthropologists, of a tribe that has four numbers: "One, Two, Three, and Many" (or as we would put it, "Infinity," in the order of George Gamow's [1947] book, One, Two, Three, ... Infinity). "Zero, One, Two, Three,... Infinity." That says it all, and it says virtually nothing at all. Once again, there's my problem of just saying it. So I'll show it (see Figure 1).
If it doesn't make much sense at this point, that's O.K. I evoke the figure here (1) perhaps to help me give you a little bit of a feel for semiotics, and (2) because it marks the beginning of the story that follows. This story comes primarily from North American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. My approach to the sign over the years began in French structuralism and what usually went by the name of "semiology." Then it took a respectfully obedient turn to poststructuralism at the proper moment. Since the latter 1970s, however, it has been indelibly Peircean. Peirce's concept of the sign is triadic through and through. It is so triadic that virtually everything he wrote could be condensed into sets of threes. So triadicity became my focus. As everybody who has tried to tackle Peirce knows, his semiotics on the surface appears so complex as to defy the imagination. Replete with abstractions and logical and mathematical concepts and invented words, at every turn it challenges one's mania for ordering things into neat packages. That is one of the reasons scholars in the humanities find him so inaccessible. I would suggest, however, that at heart Peirce's semiotics is as simple as can be. It is so simple that if you can think "0, 1, 2, 3,... 
" you can get it. I mean this as no insult to your intelligence, of course. Yet, that's it. "Zero, One, Two, Three,... Infinity."
"Whether you know it or not, your introducing 'Zero' and 'Infinity' complicates the issue inordinately," someone says.
And s/he is right. There is nothing more unfathomable than "Zero" and "Infinity." Yet, somehow we know them. We know them because we know semiotics and we know semiotics because we naturally take to it like ducks to water.
Figure 2
Let me offer an example from the ancient Greek, Zeno, and his paradoxes, both venerated and denigrated. Zeno's paradoxes are based on linear thinking. To illustrate one of them, get up out of whatever seat you are in and walk toward the nearest wall. The path between you and the wall is not chopped up into discrete bits. There is obviously no digitalization. You just flow along, your arms swing in rhythm with your legs, your torso, and your head. In short order you're there, safe and sound at your destination. Simple, you might wish to say. You just amble from one spot to another spot, something like the ambling Peircean sign, as we shall observe in the accompanying story. The sign is in perpetual motion, but it returns into itself, it is in-forming, self-repeating, yet it is always becoming something other than what it was becoming, and it never stands a chance of becoming what it will be and fixed for all time. It is a sort of three-way Yin-Yang image, hence even more unbalanced, syncopic, and asymmetrical than the familiar Oriental sign (see Figure 2).
But is your ambling toward the wall and the sign's three-way wobbling amble as simply as they might appear? Actually, they are quite complex, at least from Zeno's view. Zeno tells us that before you reach the wall you must walk half the distance between yourself and your destination. Then before you can smack your nose into the solid vertical impediment, you must walk half the remaining distance, and then half of that distance, and so on, ad infinitum. From within Zeno's discrete linear series, you can never reach the wall--and your nose is thankful for that fact. That is the problem. Zeno combines his linear, time-bound series with what you originally took to be a continuum when you walked from your position to the wall. They simply can't be mixed. But he mixes them. He is essentially telling us "First walk from here to there then walk from there to there, and so on." But how is the path we are walking on defined? Why, like a continuum. Zeno mixes temporal and spatial increments with continuity. Hence the paradox.
However, we all live in a radically nonlinear world. In your room there are at least four walls, I would expect. There also may be doors and windows and light fixtures and a floor and a ceiling and perhaps some odoriferous tennies tossed on the floor and books and papers strewn about and even the remains of last night's pizza on the table. There is all that and more. Look around you. Things are everywhere. No,... that's not right, not really. Events are everywhere. "Events?" Yes. Events, because things never stay the same. We slap names on them and try to make them permanent fixtures in our world with the assumption that they are the same things, yesterday, today, and tomorrow. But they are not. Suppose you tossed your tennies over there in the corner last night. An event. Now they are there. Even though at the moment they are not suffering their usual pavement pounding, there is activity in those shoes. Material is slowly deteriorating, microorganisms are chewing, colors are fading. They are there and poised for your daily comings and goings. And more wear and tear. Those tennies are never at a standstill but in constant change. They are never really what they are because they are always becoming something other than what they are. They are new becoming old, slightly uncomfortable becoming conformity with your toes, unblemished fabric becoming perforated with a few holes. Eventually they will be garbage becoming. They are an event, a process of eventing. They event. Their eventing events.
In other words, our world is a world of incessant change. Nothing is absolutely permanent; everything is to a greater or lesser degree impermanent. The ancient Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, once said you can never step into the same river twice. Twentieth-century philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote that Heraclitus's words were an understatement if he had ever seen one. Actually, you can never even step in the same river once, for there is no "same river." It is always different from what it was. In our world of incessant change, Zeno's paradoxes don't stand a chance. Get up and walk toward the wall, and while doing so your eyes might spy a book you need to get read for a term paper, your ears pick up traffic and a squawking crow outside, your nostrils receive a faint waft of stale pizza on the table, your feet sense contact with the floor. At any moment and at any spot in your path you can diverge in any one of a virtual infinity of directions toward your tennies, the window, the sofa, your calculus book. But you don't. You continue walking toward the wall.
And then there you are, flat against the wall. "Zeno's paradoxes are fantasyland," you think to yourself. You took "Infinity" and along with it "Zero" and the infinite series of integers that converges to an infinitesimal point in your stride, with little ado. Of course, from within Zeno's mighty logic, the paradoxes are able to exercise their force. But in our concrete, radically nonlinear world of everyday living, they are of no account. Or to give all this a semiotic image, take the set of signs in Figure 3 as a
Figure 3
multiple depiction of the sign in Figure 2. At the upper left we have one sign. Then by a 120° rotation we have another sign to the right of it. Then by a 240° rotation we have the third of the three possible signs. All on a flat plane and there for all to see, clearly and simply. But that is not the whole tale signs tell. Actually, if the sign wobbles, there must be possible rotation in and out of the plane in the third dimension, as depicted in the lower three signs. If we put all these motions together, we would have a fractal image comparable to the accompanying pattern. Study it, and you will begin to understand the complexity of even the most simple of signs.
The above picture from Symmetry in Chaos: A Search for Pattern in Mathematics, Art and Nature. Michael Field and Martin Golubitsky. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p.7.
Now, I admit I have in turn oversimplified Zeno and nonlinear processes drastically for the sake of illustration. Zeno's subtle argument has actually intrigued and baffled and confounded Western philosophers for centuries. I hold no pretentions of being able to add anything of value to Zeno scholarship. My intentions in this essay are in comparison exceedingly modest. And practical. All I ask is that you keep the Zeno example in mind. It will, itself, be implied in many of the pages that follow. However, I must also issue the warning that although "One, Two, Three," preceded by "Zero," might appear as simple as can be, appearances deceive. The equation, when placed within Peirce's triadic view of signs and of the world, is a whirling spiral of nonlinear activity so numbly complex as to boggle the imagination. With reason it is topped off with "Infinity." Not to fret, however. If we just allow ourselves to go with the flow, we will eventually begin taking the confusion in our stride.
I say no more in this opening statement. My next statement about the sign might appear as enigmatic as the previous one. However, this will be a necessary step, I would suggest. Simply put, I believe I must get all my cards out on the table before I can show you what I have in mind regarding semiotics.
1. I am indebted to Tso-wei Hsieh for construction of this page.
25 Feb. 2003