The Semiotic Activity

The term semiotics today calls to mind a tradition rather than a homogeneous body of doctrine. The period of the Stoics, the Middle Ages with its modi significandi, the eighteenth century with Locke, Leibniz, Condillac and the Ideologists, and family the beginning of the twentieth and then entered Saussurian and, later, Hjelmslevian and structural linguistics – these are the great moments of that semiotic activity which marks our Western episteme from its Greek beginnings to its positive apotheosis. Yet it is clear that if this semiotic activity has always been present in the organization of our knowledge, it is only very recently, within no more than the last few years, that it has emerged once more into the scientific and even ideological consciousness, taking its place in this resurgence amongst those events that characterize radically modern thought.

How is this emergence today of semiotics to be explained? To try to answer that question is, in fact, to try to answer a question that, because posed in metaphysical terms, is considerably more awkward; “What is semiotics?’. In this paper I shall attempt to outline the terms of an answer by following briefly through history the determination and the impact of the semiotic enterprise in its ‘great moments’ in the Western episteme. I shall then go on to consider the situation of contemporary semiotics in relation to the fact of its emergence (what is it that today troubles and revives semiotic thinking?) and, at the same time, to consider to what extent it can break with its past in order to allow the recasting of those disciplines which were permitted by its inaugural gesture – logic and, closer to us, the human science. For, and here I am anticipating the thesis that I am going to stress at the end of this paper, if the raison d’etre of the semiotic enterprise form the time of the Stoics to the present day has always been to found scientific abstraction in posing the sign and in so doing allowing the constitution of science (including linguistics science) as systematization and formalization, semiotics is now called upon to question these foundations, the foundations of science (and of linguistics), and to work towards the constitution of a theory of knowledge in which the project of linguistics, duly questioned, will itself be integrated. In other words, having provided the positive foundations of metaphysics and/or science, semiotics now offers itself as the area of the interrogation, analysis and criticism of metaphysics and/or science that they may be re founded in a new theoretical gesture (of which all that may be said is that it is practiced as a critique of metaphysics).