Semiotic Investigations: Towards an Effective Semiotics
Alec McHoul
Part One
The Limits and Media of Semiosis
Chapter 3
Culture and Community
In the previous investigation, we saw that it can be useful to look at the frame of a text, at the parergonal space where signs and their many possible not-signs connect and disconnect in order to mean, in order to be used in locally specific ways. But once again, is there an all-embracing term for this space immediately surrounding (or still further "outside") the sign? Is there a general ensemble of sign-to-not-sign relations - and if so, what is its name? We have already seen in chapter 1 that the idea of a total history is unavailable to any effective semiotic investigation. "History," in the Hegelian sense, then, cannot be the name of a general sign-context. Instead, we have seen that history needs to be thought of as a local and piecemeal positioning of semiosic techniques undertaken by and for particular communities, in and as particular forms of everyday life. To use Maurice Natanson's distinction, there is no "Big history" ("the history of Hegel, Spengler and Toynbee") - or, rather, "Big history" is always only an idea, always an ideal effect of particular and practical "little histories," the histories of
ordinary people in the everyday, working world, living their lives, involved in the daily web of obscure projects and minor skirmishes, the history of the unknown, the unsung, and the easily forgotten.1
That is, history in the space of the effective: the history of Sarah Burge, for example. Once history is detotalized in this and other ways, can we then move on to a more appropriate general "medium" for semiosis? Could we just call it "the popular" and leave it at that, thus allowing some version of Cultural Studies to move into semiotics? Does culture, as a concept, really work in any definite way?
In recent times, and at least since the ascendancy of Cultural Studies, it has become increasingly tempting to invoke the term "culture" as a kind of benign proxy for the more problematic term "history." "Culture" has at least had the advantage that it can stand in for the kind of contextual-explanatory work which is strictly not available to formalist semiotics. It is as though we could "flesh out" the extra-linguistic (or, perhaps, extra-semiotic) aspects of a sign or text with a single concept, "culture," which would provide us with a new englobing context and an immanent "spirit" for it. What I have in mind here, then, is that the idea of "culture" may be (as "history" was before it) far too general to do the work of analyzing signs - or saying how particular signs mean (how they are used). And I think the problem remains even if we refer a sign to a particular culture rather than to culture in some very general sense. Used in either sense, the analytic concept of culture seems to betray what Wittgenstein called our "craving for generality," our "contemptuous attitude towards the particular case."2
One possible recent exception to this over-totalizing version of culture would be Stephen Greenblatt's "cultural poetics": a continuing argument about the boundaries of specific cultural objects and their negotiability.3 Greenblatt rejects general theories of the relation (in his case) between "art" and "society," particularly those of Jameson and Lyotard. While Jameson, he argues, reads (capitalist) society as closing down the possibilities of aesthetic meanings, Lyotard characterizes it as proliferating meanings, almost to the point of meaninglessness. Greenblatt, against both, argues that capitalism involves a dizzying oscillation between the two. But can semiosic closure and openness (separately or in oscillation) be the basis of a general theory of social signs? Isn't their specific operation, in situ, a more appropriate object of analysis - without any necessary and a priori condition of proliferation, monologism or oscillation? (Which is not to say that any of these three might not be part of some actual community's semiosic "tactics.") And why, after his critique of Jameson and Lyotard, does Greenblatt want to hold on to the centrality of capitalism as the marker of the social? In these instances, we can see that contemporary relativist positions, such as the "New Historicism" still hold on to the remnants of a totalizing version of the relation between history, society and/or culture on the one hand and signs, texts and/or artworks on the other.4
However we study the vast and indeterminate area known as "culture," there is, as I have suggested, a possibility of the term "Cultural Studies" coming to be the descriptor for the ensuing investigations.5 The problem here is that "Cultural Studies" is also a name with a very specific history, having by and large to do with events and ideas in Birmingham (England) in the 1970s. Originally, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) had a fairly straightforward conception of the problem: how to take cultural affairs out of the hands of English Departments, appreciationism and aestheticism, and re-situate them on a Marxist (or perhaps even semiotic) terrain.6 If one looks at the work of Stuart Hall, for example, it's easy to see him beginning with a radical economism and moving towards a position whereby the domain of culture is not just produced (by material economic forces) but productive in its own right. Nevertheless, even at its most "culturalist" moment (and this seems to be the central problem), Birmingham Cultural Studies has always wanted to theorize at least some kind of relation between economy and culture, as if one already possessed the firm dockside (economy) and the unpredictably bobbing ship (culture), so that all one needed were the rope. This, of course, raises many questions. The one that concerns me most is the idea of having to find a relation of any sort. And we can approach this problem by looking at the "non-cultural" partner in this uneasy marriage: economy.
Why economy? The answer has to do, I think, with the central position of something called "the economy" within 1970s Marxism - despite the fact that a conglomerated concept of "the economy" is nowhere to be found in the writings of Marx. (In fact it does not appear until Keynes, and does not arrive in popular English idioms until the 1960s - prior to this "economy" meant "economizing.")7 The upshot of this is that "economy" and "culture" become reifying terms: glossing over specific, local and particular social practices in an effort to produce an idea or a "theory." (And it is to this extent that "culture" has become something rather like Natanson's "Big history.") In fact, all that is produced is a kind of theoreticist game with large blocks of hazy conceptual entities whose "relations" are supposed to be investigated. The struggle is almost always for a ghostly "third term" ("reflection," "refraction," "semi-autonomy" and so on) which will make the connection. However, there is no good reason for separating the two in the first place - especially when both are so nebulous that they can quite easily contain each other's features (as Raymond Williams has so aptly shown).8
And so: if one wanted to study some domain called "culture," it would seem to be necessary, nowadays, to imagine - per impossible - a discipline called "culturics" (on the model of the terms "politics" and "economics") which would try to specify a positive domain of analysis rather than an epiphenomenon of some other. And that bizarre problematic, so far as I know, is not currently being pursued. When culture is always the central object and always, at the same time, secondary to something equally unspecific, the concept would seem to be a very unsatisfactory one and of very little use in the analysis of fine, local and specific uses of signs.
But after all this, has there been no "culturics"? One of the recent upshots of Birmingham-style thinking - perhaps by virtue of the problems raised above - has been its more libertarian wing. What I have in mind here is those research programs which have taken the question of cultural "autonomy" so seriously as to turn it into what was previously (for Marxism) a kind of "material base" in its own right: so that now cultural structures and systems are supposed to explain other things outside them ("everyday life," for example). Now we hear that readers, audiences, "consumers," and so on, have complete autonomy over what it is they do, in and as cultural practices, such that any and every reading can be made, and such that these readings are "resistive" and "transgressive" - with the consequence that the traditional Marxist domain of "production" can be forgotten altogether. Reading, it would seem, no longer has limits; it no longer comes to an end anywhere, but is, rather, all-encompassing, a means by which persons create their lives and meanings just as they wish - as though they were to pull themselves up by their own hair.
Curiously the effect of this movement has been to reinscribe "culture" into the domain of the aesthetic - cultural analysis and cultural practice (or intervention) become indistinguishable. Instead of an analysis of signs, we get a kind of creative writing. The value of "culture," now, it would seem, is just as it was for Leavis: neither dogmatically working-class, nor decadently aristocratic but, for example, ethnically, racially, genderedly, and so on, "authentic." Analyzing signs in terms of their cultural locations means, effectively, returning them to their "authenticity," which then takes on the position of another essence or center.
The concept of "culture" can be so broad, then, that almost anything can be placed within it. And this includes the use of signs - so that only the most general references to "semiosis" or "discourse" need to be invoked. Returning to the case of Stuart Hall, we find him writing, for example, of "discourses" in the most general way and yet appearing to say something profound about a particular historical and political situation:
[A]nyone who is genuinely interested in the production and mechanisms of ideology must be concerned with the question of the production of subjects and the unconscious categories that enable definite forms of subjectivity to arise. It is clear that the discourses of the New Right have been engaged precisely in this work of the production of new subject positions and the transformation of subjectivities.9
I have no doubt that Hall is referring here to a very significant problem: any semiotics which is to get beyond a purely formalist manipulation of signs for its own sake is going to have to come to terms with questions of the subject and subjectivity. But to do it in this way, as if one were manipulating large blocks of material called "ideology," "discourse(s)," "the subject," "the unconscious" and so on, will miss precisely the level of specificity to which an attention to the use of particular signs is directed. In fact, cultural analysis of this kind constitutes another kind of formalism in its own right: a formalism of abstract socio-political categories which, as it were, stand proxy for actual investigations. Simply because semiotic concepts (such as "discourse") can become all-embracing, or can be subsumed under even more general categories such as "culture," does not mean that they must or indeed that they should.
"Culture" - whatever its pseudo-explanatory power as a concept - is a sign in its own right and it is a fairly recent one. It dates roughly from the Enlightenment, though (so to speak) certain ur-forms of it can be found from the very beginnings of political investigations of human practices as specifically human practices (that is, where those practices are accounted for in terms of collective human volition rather than in terms of divine or extra-human forces). Although one could return to Aristotle here, the notable turning-point for English-speaking people is the intervention of Hobbes. From Hobbes to the Enlightenment, there is a concerted attempt to find what it is that's "behind" human affairs - if you like, a replacement for an absent God, a quasi-causal locus that would go towards explaining how it is that people sometimes seem to act in perspicuously regular ways when in relatively close association (such that one comes to need a name for the groupings which do act in those ways, as opposed to others who act in differently regular ways). But the national and local practices that need to be conflated by such a concept are so diverse that whatever concept is used to collect them will be virtually meaningless in terms of any of those specific practices. Ur-terms such as Weltanschauung, Zeitgeist, Lingua Mentalis and so on all share this problem - as do contemporary forms of reductionist structuralism. They want to do everything at once: to provide the name of a secular god and its church - a common "membership," "institution," and "purpose" behind incommensurate and disparate practices. The Enlightenment concept of "culture" fitted the bill perfectly: to the point where it is now almost impossible to imagine a practice which is not "cultural" and which does not itself have a concept of (or like) "culture."
And so, there is a problem for us in attempting to use the concept of culture to do studies of how signs are used which are answerable to the specificity of those usages. For the use of the concept of culture is going to completely detract from those ends. "Culture" is like a nostrum.10 Saying that something is "cultural" makes us feel better. It might make us feel as if we have located our proper objects in a specific intellectual domain. But in fact, the "fitting" is always illusory. All we have done, by saying, for example, that specific uses of signs are "cultural" is to make them vaguer, more like each other, less differentiable.
"Culture" is like the quasi-scientific terms used by philosophers to categorize specific events into more general types which the later Wittgenstein sought to criticize on the grounds that they provided a whole range of illegitimate questions (such as those concerning the "relations" between the types). In his practical work with Grant and Reeve on patients suffering from (what was routinely referred to as) "battle shock" or simply "shock," Wittgenstein sought to remove the same kinds of "fog" from diagnostic practice - not simply because it was "philosophically" wrong, but also because it did no good for the patients themselves. A passage in Grant and Reeve's final report may possibly, argues his biographer, have been written by Wittgenstein himself:
In practice we found that the diagnosis of shock seemed to depend on the personal views of the individual making it rather than on generally accepted criteria. Unless we were acquainted with these views we did not know what to expect when called to the bedside. The label alone did not indicate what signs and symptoms the patient displayed, how ill he was or what treatment he required. The only common ground for diagnosis that we could detect was that the patient seemed ill. We were led, therefore, to discard the word "shock" in its varying definitions. We have not since found it to be of any value in the study of injury; it has rather been a hindrance to unbiased observation and a cause of misunderstanding.11
Ditto the concept of culture in the study of how signs are used.
In order to overcome this problem, throughout its long history, the term "culture" has come to be defined, therefore, not just in terms of massive generality and englobement but also in terms of what it is not, in terms of its non-cultural "other." Naturally, the two tendencies do not sit easily together; so that the candidates for the title of "other" have been so mixed and variable that, depending on preferences - like the preferences of those who diagnose shock - they can be either included (as "cultural") or excluded (as "other") almost at will. Sometimes culture is opposed to society; at other times it is included within it; or else society is included within culture. The same goes for language, utility, science, nature, economy, politics, history, discourse, reality, nation, government, morality, community, everyday life ... and so on. Eventually everything is cultural or (depending on preference) almost nothing is.
One disturbing aspect of this is that the term "culture" is not (and has not been) simply used as an analytic concept, or even a descriptive one. At each phase, it has also had a strong element of normativity about it, such that it not only appears to account for human practices (as it were, after the fact) but it also, perhaps inevitably, is used to control and prescribe those practices. Jon Stratton argues that, for example (and here we must cut a very long story short), mainstream sociological conceptions of culture emerge alongside and within the industrial bourgeoisie in the 19th century, to provide an abstract "spiritual" schema to legitimate its privileged social position in the absence of obvious traditional or religious grounds for that privilege.12 The refined version which emerges later, with Talcott Parsons, Stratton argues, is no more nor less than an identification of society's "cultural function" with middle-class forms of correct conduct (such that, for example, one has a built-in theory of deviance in terms of divergences from it). Even the more libertarian attempts to identify "deviant sub-cultures" on their own terms (and thus to explain their "anti-languages") seem to require at least some division of this sort. In short: the act of choosing a circumscription of the domain of culture, from the long list of available circumscriptions, always involves a political-ethical choice which has consequences for the judgment (as well as the analysis) of human practices. It is not that this prescriptive domain can be eliminated in order to provide a kind of neutral science - in semiotics or elsewhere. On the contrary, factual claims, especially in the humanities and social sciences, insofar as they are always interpretable by the "objects" about which they are made (persons, groups, cultures and so on), will always carry value. This is not the point. The point is that the concept of culture seems to want to do double duty in this field: to cover everything (the totality of facts and values, as it were "purely" from outside those facts and values) and to discriminate, to value this or that as - factually - "cultural" or "other-than-cultural," for example, as "economic" or "natural." And this would mean that, if culture is to be a central concept of any investigation, it is always already duplicitous.
And so, perhaps against the grain of current trends in the humanities and social sciences, I think there is much more to be said for a concept which is designed to refer to the local specificity of methodic activities (signs) than for a concept which elides this level of investigation. There is no currently available term for the former type - hence the rather awkward term "community" which I borrow, to some extent, from the history of science. Although Kuhn's conception of a "scientific community" has strong vestiges of necessary consensus, contract and agreement worked into it, the reconstruction of that concept by Latour does not.13 In fact Latour makes an empirical object of how it is that scientific communities struggle to maintain semiotic unity (that is fixity or non-interpretability) for the signs in their domains of interest. This struggle suggests that the kinds of agreement which Kuhn relies on are themselves predicated on the possibility of contestation over meanings. And again, for Latour, a "community" is an empirical locus rather than an arrangement of abstract and general ideas into a consensual paradigm.
The idea of a community as a topographical entity - a group of persons who are physically co-present to each other and who, in some rather abstract way, agree or contract to act together in concert - is no longer its central sense in philosophy or the social sciences. For example, Johannes Fabian has argued that anthropology relies on a version of the communities which make up its "object" such that they are seen as occupying different times and spaces from anthropological communities.14 He shows, then (even if he bemoans the fact), that communities need not be, to use his term, "coeval." They do not have to be bound by synchronicity, contemporaneity or concurrence; rather they may be dispersed in time and space. Instead, communities can be connected by looser social structures and forms of knowledge. To extend this notion, we could think of communities as any collectivities which assemble (physically or by other means) for relatively common (including dissensual) semiosic activities. A community may be a traditional grouping such as a particular group of religious practitioners who meet regularly for common worship. But it may also be a looser group connected by relatively tenuous affinities, such as the "/Trekkies" (or "Slash-Trekkies") - fans of the TV and movie series, Star Trek, who communicate through a diversity of means, mainly through the circulation (in magazines and on electronic bulletin boards) of fan stories in which the Star Trek characters are radically altered from their more expectable sexual identities.
Other communities may be much less specific, bound by the most general of ties. At the limit, they may barely be able to be described as communicational entities at all. An example here is Derrida's "New International," a community which hardly exists but which may be brought about at some later date. This new International will, Derrida claims, be comprised of an ensemble of men, women and children all of whom are suffering despite or because of the international spread of so-called liberal democracy. In today's supposedly egalitarian "new world order," the apparent goal is the deletion of violence, famine, economic oppression, and so on. Yet, for Derrida, the claims are false - particular and local forms of suffering are manifest everywhere, in every country, at every crossroads. Derrida's new International announces a bringing together of these local points which have (specters of Weber?) lines of affinity rather than a common party, doctrine or ideology. The point of this is, in the end, a new deconstruction outside its narrow philosophico-analytic confines: the irruption of a new form of justice whose name is 'deconstruction'.15
The example is an extreme one but it does have alignments with some recent philosophical thinking about the idea of community. Following the later work of Heidegger, Jean-Luc Nancy, for example, argues that the concept of history is no longer available in its total form:
Our time is no longer the time of history, and therefore, history itself appears to have become part of history. Our time is the time, or a time ... of the suspense or suspension of history - in the sense of both a certain rhythm and of uneasy expectation. History is suspended, without movement, and we can anticipate only with uncertainty or with anxiety what will happen if it moves forward again (if it is still possible to imagine something like a "forward movement"), or if it does not move at all.16
Paradoxically, this Heideggerian-Nietzschean version of history has, itself, a particular historical locus which happens to be now - and no doubt it has a specific geographical locus too, which Nancy fails to mention. However, and importantly for us, if, for Nancy, a total history, a grand narrative of history, is no longer available, we still have to understand what our specific history is, we have to understand what takes its place. And his answer is just this: "history - if we can remove this word from its metaphysical, and therefore historical, determination - does not belong primarily to time, nor to succession, nor to causality, but to community, or to being-in-common."17 "Community," that is, is Nancy's term for the state of history after (total) history; yet his "being-in-common" does not return us to an unduly Gemeinschaft, organicist, folksy, or just plain jolly, sense of community as a "common being."18 Instead of this irenics, Nancy's being-in-common points to what happens; it points precisely to the domain of the effective, the in-process:
And this is so because community itself is something historical. Which means that it is not a substance, nor a subject; it is not a common being, which could be the goal or culmination of a progressive process. It is rather a being-in-common which only happens, or which is happening, an event, more than a "being." I shall attempt to present this happening of being itself, the noninfinity of its own existence, as finite history.19
Communities, on this reading, would then be collections of what happens - documentably. And since happening is never available in its purity (as a pure event-object), it is always a happening-in-semiosis, an activity which, for "us" (those doing it), is more or less methodic. Methodicity indicates a common way - particularly a common way of doing things. This commonality is, therefore, not an object like "common sense" which can be analyzed for its regular properties. Rather, we (even those of us "doing it") may be surprised by the next turn of events. This is precisely because we have no sense of what a fixed history, or fixed rules, may bring. A community, then, is whoever (collectively) copes - methodically - together with what happens, which may conform to what we think are collective expectations but which also may not. This is the possibility of otherness - even of otherness-from-us. "Finite history is the occurrence of existence, in common, for it is the 'togetherness of otherness.' This also means that it is the occurrence of freedom and decision to exist."20
Another way, then, of expressing this revisionist concept of community would be to say that communities are collections of members. But here we would have to think of membership in its early ethnomethodological sense. Here, "member" does refer to a person, rather:
It means a course of activity, recognizable for its directionality, its origins, its motivated character, by a procedure for demonstrating that that is what is going on.... Do not think a member is a person. Think of "member" as an ongoing course of activity locatable as a feature of an organized course of activities in its course.21
And, with a possible caveat about the term "origins" (above), this idea of members as courses of activity seems to fit quite well with Nancy's idea of communities as "what happens."
But on a different reading, it may simply be that, empirically, today, communities are just not "cultural," or grounded in any traditional sense. Community may no longer imply the stifling but secure sense of "culture." The "freedom and decision to exist" outside that space may be a function of its sheer non-availability. This is what Edward Said conjectures - somewhat autobiographically - and following in the wake of Deleuze and Guattari's nomadology:
it is no exaggeration to say that liberation as an intellectual mission, born in the resistance and opposition to the confinements and ravages of imperialism, has now shifted from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics of culture to its unhoused, decentred, and exilic energies, energies whose incarnation today is the migrant, and whose consciousness is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes, and between languages. From this perspective then all things are counter-original, spare, strange.22
Community, after Kuhn, Latour, Derrida and Nancy (and, perhaps, after Said) may be the concept with which an effective semiotics could handle the space around the sign, its framing. And, in this sense, it would be my preferred option - if there needs to be an option. But this still leaves open an important question: what are the relations between any given sign (or signs) and its possible others (its not-signs)? This does not look as if it will be easily resolved by a single over-arching theory or concept, even if the concept of community is the front-runner. Is there any way we can account for the potential dispersal and difference of this domain, or indeed for its potential closure (for we know that there are actual communities which work this way) - each depending on particular circumstances? Is there, that is, any way of accounting for the specificity of relations between sign and not-sign and still having something like a general theory of semiosis? Perhaps it is not exactly a theory that's required here so much as a method or analytic mentality which allows for a highly piecemeal, or nomadic, understanding of semiosis. This is the direction of the investigation in the next chapter.
The idea of a "not-sign" (of an outside-the-sign) is obviously something it would be better for any respectably theoretical semiotics to do without. It sounds, to use the Kantian term, noumenal: a thing-in-itself which is knowable and to which the sign can be fastened. In its ultimate, absolute and pure sense, everything so far points against this and nothing toward it. But what if there are communities who actually work this way - who act (dare we say, "as if"?) on the basis of existents outside the signs they use, and in order to make those signs work? And, to continue the hypothetical point, it may be that any given "not-sign," for any given community, may not be (as some philosophers have always hoped) a thing-as-such. Instead, it might be any number of available others. So this is what our investigation of the not-sign will always remember: what is taken to be outside the sign, as its point of contact with some meaning-for-now, is not an object for philosophical scrutiny. Rather it is what a particular community is using, here and now, as part of the practical management of its everyday affairs. This is where effective semiotics parts company from philosophy.
=> Chapter 4
This page incorporates material from Garry Gillard's Freotopia website, that he started in 2014 and the contents of which he donated to Wikimedia Australia in 2024. The content was originally hosted at freotopia.org/people/alecmchoul/seminv/3.html, and has been edited since it was imported here (see page history). The donated data is also preserved in the Internet Archive's collection.