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CHARLES SANDERS PEIRCE’S THEORY OF
SIGNS, MEANING, AND LITERARY INTERPRETATION
by
Now
thought is of the nature of a sign. In that case, then, if we can find out the
right method of thinking and can follow it out—the right method of transforming
signs—then truth can be nothing more nor less than the last result to which the
following out of this method would ultimately carry us.
--Charles Sanders Peirce
Despite 9/11, “United We
Stand,” and the USA Patriot Act, it seems that we are still afflicted by logocentrism and essentializing metanarratives. Decades of inoculation by deconstructive
serums—first introduced by Jacques Derrida’s 1966 lecture at Johns Hopkins
University entitled “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human
Sciences”—have failed to immunize us, readers and scholars, from lusting for
truth, presence, or origin far removed
“from freeplay and from the order of the sign”
(1986, 492). The order of the sign instructs us, following Saussure’s
dictum, that the relation between the signifier (word), its referent (thing or
idea) and its signified (meaning) is arbitrary. Not in the sense that words
mean just anything you decide it means. There is no natural resemblance between
sound-image, referent, and idea; the link between signifier and signified is
based on alterable social convention. Saussure taught
us that the meaning or value of a sign in any language results from its
difference to all the other signs in that language. What is important is not history (diachrony) nor
reality (the referent), but the system of differential relations among signs
(synchrony). Such differential relations are embodied in the spacing and
ambiguity of writing as material practice or process, in contrast to speech
(which Saussure privileged) and its single,
self-identical intention. Barbara Johnson glosses Derrida’s valorization of
writing as the euphoric “free play” celebrated earlier: “When one writes, one
writes more than (or less than, or other than) one thinks. The reader’s task is
to read what is written rather than simply attempt to intuit what might have
been meant” (1990, 46).
Now there is general
agreement that “free play” does not sanction anarchy or “anything goes,”
although Derrida’s invocation of Nietzsche and the end of humanism tends to
inspire the abolition of boundaries and rules. What is often stressed is that
reading, re-presenting, depends on the historical and social contexts in which
language is used. However, such contexts are always changeable and changing.
Derrida contends that “There is no meaning outside of context, but no context
permits saturation” (1979, 81). Derrida assumes that there is
an infinite number of contexts for any utterance; this iterability
of discourse is possible because the code underlying convention is slippery or
unknown, hence meaning is undecidable. Since contexts
are multiple, heterogenous and fluid, we cannot fix
on a single guaranteed meaning for any text; all such attempts to make sense
presuppose an act of interpretation, an operation of construal—in short,
ceaseless multiplication of significations. The signifying chain never ends.
From another angle, Paul de Man inflects this undecidability
by his theory of criticism as deconstructive reading. He argues that any text
generates an aporia from the conflict between its
decodable rule-oriented grammar and its rhetorical potential that “suspends
logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration” (1986,
467). Still, there is implicit here, as in Derrida, the assumption that on one
side, there is the objective world of fixed objects and on the other, the mind
or intuitive sensibility that constructs sense and meanings.
A Fateful Intervention
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the
philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce formulated a
theory of signs that ingeniously resolved the old Cartesian dualism of subject
and object. Paralleling subsequent developments in phenomenology (Merleau-Ponty) and dialectical Marxism (Lukacs,
Gramsci), Peirce’s logic
helped clear up the traditional disputes concerning indeterminacy, intention,
reference, agency, interpretive validity, etc.
On the matter of
hermeneutics, we are not proposing here a return to the formalist view of an
autonomous text relying on authorial intention. Nor do we envisage a
recuperation of the legible/readable text based on the hermeneutic circle
replete with multiple if contradictory significations (Gadamer,
Ricoeur). Saussure is of
course not the “culprit” responsible for legitimizing modes of misreading or
misprision as heuristic if not axiomatic techniques of exegesis. Even when one
begins to focus on Saussure’s linguistics, or its
distortion, as the single source for authorizing free-floating interpretations,
one is immediately disabused. The zealous exponent of deconstruction, Jonathan
Culler, has named Peirce as an accomplice in the
oscillation or drift/deferral/slippage of signifiers and signifieds:
There
are no final meanings that arrest the movement of signification. Peirce makes this structure of deferral and referral an
aspect of his definition: a sign is “anything which determines something else
(its interpretant) to refer to an object to
which itself [sic] refers (its object) in the same way, the interpretant becoming in turn a sign, and so on ad
infinitum.... If the series of successive interpretants
comes to an end, the sign is thereby rendered imperfect, at least” (1982, 188).
Derrida tellingly omitted Peirce’s qualification before the last sentence in the
quote: “No doubt, intelligent consciousness must enter into the series” (Peirce 1991, 239).
In Of Grammatology, Derrida enlists Peirce
in support of his scheme of destroying the “transcendental signified,” and with
it, ontotheology and the metaphysics of presence, on
account of Peirce’s view that the represented is
“always already” a representamen, a palimpsest or
fabric of traces (1976, 50).
Let us rehearse again Peirce’s inaugural definition that he refined with
significant nuances over the years. For Peirce, the
sign or representamen is “something which stands to
somebody for something in some respect or capacity.” The representamen
provides the occasion for linkage or ground for connecting object and sign. It
does so by addressing somebody, that is, creates in the mind of someone an
equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign” which is called the interpretant or the effect that the sign produces (more
precisely, a moment in the evolving consensus of a community of interpreters):
“The triadic relation is genuine, that is, its three members are bound
together by it in a way that does not consist in any complexus
of dyadic relations. That is the reason the Interpretant, or Third, cannot stand in a mere dyadic
relation to the Object, but must stand in such a relation to it as the Representamen itself does” (1955, 100). In other words, the interpretant
determines how the sign represents the object and can be regarded as the
meaning of the sign (Ducrot and Todorov
1979, 85). Eventually the sequence of interpretants glossing
other interpretants leads to an “ultimate logical interpretant,” which is equivalent to “a change of habit of
conduct” (Hilpinen 1995, 567). In effect, the intervention of the interpretant (divisible into emotional, energetic, and
logical; Short 1986, 107) makes impossible what postmodernist critics call the
reified binary closure of signifier/signified, a syndrome resolved in favor of fetishizing “differance”
and “dissemination.”
For Peirce,
‘the word or sign that man uses is the man himself,” hence “expression
and thought are one,” and “every thought is a sign” (1958, 381; Innis 1985, 2; compare Hjelmslev’s
theory in Hasan 1987), Peirce’s
concept of semiosis is not the unwarranted
extravaganza posited by Derrida because there is in it a continual reference to
the object of the representamen/signifier existing in
a world outside consciousness, a world manifested in the phenomena of
experience mediated by signs. This referent is not a static entity but a
dynamic object, “an ever-developing cumulative definition of it, to be
distinguished from the immediate object conjured up in any individual
signification” (Potts 1996, 19; see also Eco 1995). Further, the exigencies of practical life, as
well as the criteria of logical economy and “concrete reasonableness” (Thompson
1953, 255; Apel 1995, 89) circumscribe the
actualization of the endless development of sign-production. While the meaning
of a sign is “altogether virtual,” the fully articulated meaning inheres in the
habits of interpretation, the capacities and dispositions these habits are
calculated to produce; such habits are assessed in terms of whether it leads to
the “entire general intended interpretant” which, for
Pierce, gives “command of a whole range of a sign’s possible interpretations” (Gallie 1952, 130) resulting from the use of a more adequate
and systematized body of information. Semiosis is
thus rendered concretely determinate by the goal of “concrete reasonableness”;
the latter phrase refers to the logically controlled use of signs in purposive
thinking, with relevance to real problems of adaptation and adjustment of
humans to their sociohistorical environment.
Synoptic Overview
Peirce’s semiotics is thus a crucial rectification of Saussure’s semantics of differential values. Peirce’s realism subtends the objective persistence of a
social order or civilization, a continuum, “the pulp itself of the matter which
is manipulated by semiosis, to use Eco’s words (1984,
45), which is problematized by post-structuralist deconstruction. For Peirce,
a sign is anything—from pictures, words, signals, microscopes, legislative
representatives, musical concertos, their performances, etc.—which stands for
something else. Peirce emphasizes that “signs are reals” bearing formal characteristics: “anything which is
related to a Second thing, its Object, in respect to a Quality in such a way as
to bring a Third Thing, its Interpretant, into
relation with the same object...” There are four requirements three of which
depend on Peirce’s categories: the sign, like
everything else, has some form or ground of intelligibility (Firstness); the sign stands in relation to something (Secondness), and the sign is comprehended or translated by
something else (Thirdness). I stress the fourth
requirement stipulated by Peirce: “The whole purpose
of a sign is that it should be interpreted in another sign and its whole
purpose lies in the special character which it imparts to its interpretant. When a sign determines an interpretant
of itself in another sign, it produces an effect external to itself” (CP
8.191). Given the dynamic relation between the three constituents of the sign
(sign, object, interpretant), the sign’s power
resides in its efficacy to represent something to a collectivity of inquirers,
thus establishing intelligibility.
We can now define Peirce’s semiosis as the triadic
interaction of sign, object and interpretant,
together with their ramifying combinations. It constitutes language-games
(Wittgenstein) and frames of intelligibility. Semiosis
is the condition for a community of inquirers who use signs for communication:
“The very origin of the conception of reality shows that this conception
essentially involves the notion of a COMMUNITY, without definite limits, and
capable of an increase in knowledge.” Peirce also
posits the existence of “that mind into which the minds of utterer
and interpreter have to be fused in order that any communication should take
place. This mind may be called commens. It
consists in all that is, and must be, well understood between utterer and interpreter, at the outset, in order that the
sign in question should fulfill its function” (1958, 406). Semiosis
testifies not only to the social principle in thinking (logic) but to the
continuity of the universe which Peirce called “synechism.”
It is clear then that Peirce’s semiotics differs from Saussure’s
and kindred theories founded on the dyadic or binary pair “sign/signifier.” Peirce’s is not based on the signifier but on the
proposition—the triadic relation that produces meaning. The interpretant
is not the signified but the act or process of signification, the experience of
intelligibility that unifies consciousness and produces comprehension. This is
the reason why Leroy Searle contends that “Peirce’s
account of the sign offers a very powerful way by which to represent and
analyze literature as argument, always concerned with and embedded in a real
historical context, aware of consequences, without becoming systematically
entangled in linguistic issues that are always indeterminate when considered
apart from pragmatics” (1994, 560).
Anatomy of
Configurations
Before exploring the idea
of literature as argument, let us apply the Peircean
heuristic organon to two signs of the times: “terror”
and “terrorism.” As everyone knows, this is a domain of often rancorous debate
where massive interests and motives collide,
inaccessible to rational resolution by courts or bombs (other terms that
provoke contestation are “collateral damage,” “preemptive war,” “clash of civilizations,”
etc.). We need to chart the locus of their varying interpretants
and map their shifting resonance in diverse usages.
Noam Chomsky, the indefatigable “gadfly” of the
Establishment, has traced the genealogy of those contested terms. He points out
that the
What is the object to
which the sign “terrorism” refers? Chomsky cites the
In general, Peirce’s pragmaticist maxim
follows the triadic process: the meaning of an idea lies in its consequence or
effect, what it would lead to. Meaning is discovered in the itinerary of a
thought experiment: “Consider what effects, which might conceivably have
practical bearings, we might conceive the object of our conception to have.
Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the
object” (CP 5.402). Put another way, meaning resides in the conceivable
consequence of an abduction (inference or guessing)
that we are considering. It is not the
consequences of the logic of abduction, it is what we think them to be; hence,
meaning is virtual, arising from the transformation
and interpretation of signs. In this regard, Peirce
underscores the rule for the admissibility of hypothesis: every idea involves
“a conception of conceivable practical effects” (CP 5.196).
A historical genealogy of
the terms “terror” and “terrorism” might help us shed light on the viccissitudes of meaning embroiled in social antagonisms.
The English word derives from the Latin root “terrere,”
“to frighten” and the nominal root “terror” glossed in the Oxford English
Dictionary (OED) as “intense fear, fright or dread’ and “the action or
quality of causing [such] dread; terribleness; a thing or person that excites
terror.” Aside from its occurrence in the Bible and in Gothic novels of terror,
we find its first negative use in 1788 by Gibbon: “The ferocious Bedoweens, the terror of the desert” (Mesnard
y Mendez 2002, 110). The object here are those
non-western barbarians who fed the vampiric Orientalism of the colonial empires. The political ground
in this semiotic chain came with the French revolution and the Jacobin’s “Reign
of Terror” which the OED designated as “the period...when the ruling faction
remorselessly shed the blood of persons of both sexes and of all ages and
conditions whom they regarded as obnoxious.”
The word “terrorism” is
extrapolated from the French, used in
At this juncture, we may
ask if we are able to grasp fully what is meant by the Bush administration’s
“war on terrorism”?
“Terror” as a quality or action has become personified into “terrorism.”
The signifiers have changed with the objects, but what about the interpretants and the grounds for linking sign and object?
Obviously they have changed too since meaning is a triadic interanimation
of the three categories (sign/object/interpretant).
The Establishment (media, government) now uses “terrorism” because any “ism”
sounds foreign, ideological, non- or un-American. If terrorism implies
political killing of civilians, it is something that they, aliens, do and not
us, nor the state. Terrorism acquires a transcendentally evil or satanic power.
It does not designate a group of people who have certain views, reasons and
purposes; hence, terrorists are people who draw their identity and rationale
from the sinister occult essence of “terrorism.” The slogan of “war on
terrorism” of course is designed to rally citizens to support whatever military
actions may be proclaimed as “anti-terrorist” or against the targeted
criminals, outlaws, and the amorphous Others
stigmatized by official decree. Its authority is derived from the state’s
theological pretense at global omniscience (for a sharp critical analysis of
the “metaphysics of terrorism,” see Badiou 2002).
What is more revealing is that under the USA Patriot Act, which implements the
general State policy of the war against terrorism, domestic terrorists have now
been included: “The second category of domestic terrorists, left-wing groups,
generally profess a revolutionary socialist doctrine and view themselves as
protectors of the people against the ‘dehumanizing effects’ of capitalism and
imperialism” (FBI Webpage 2001).
To remedy these biased construals, Mesnard y Mendez
expands the object of the signifier “terrorism” to include State terrorism side
by side with contemporary forms of non-State terrorism: religious group
terrorism (as between Hindus and Muslims in
I want to enter a
parenthesis here for further clarification. The occurrence of state terrorism
may be succinctly illustrated by quoting the proponents of a war of “shock and
awe”—memorable words used by Secretary Rumsfeld as he
threatened Saddam Hussein on the eve of the
Theoretically, the magnitude of Shock and
Awe Rapid Dominance seeks to impose (in extreme cases)...the non-nuclear
equivalent of the impact that the atomic weapons dropped on
The strategy of “shock and
awe” seems to mobilize the iconic and indexical function of weapons as signs,
except that the Japanese—before they could call their hermeneutic
wizards—immediately succumbed to catatonic paralysis!
Rectification of Names
We can sum up this
semantic labor by revising the conventional definition of terms. In addition to
the definition of Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary of “terrorism” as “the
use of terrorizing methods of governing or resisting a government,” Mesnard y Mendez suggests this final interpretant
which takes into account the range of historical examples noted earlier:
“terrorism is a strategy that consists in pursuing political power by striking
dread into the civilian population through exemplary killings among them. It
follows that terrorism is a matter of influencing through huge bodily harm the
collective imagination by transfer contagion: an exasperated form of
psychophysical warfare grafted onto techniques of economic and political
propaganda in the media” (2002, 117). The object of the signifier “terrorism”
is still the violence found in all the other instances, but the interpretant focuses on the agent or group who commits or
threatens to use it for gaining or promoting political power by coercing a population.
In this context, the interpretant also adds the
qualification that the killing is selective and instrumentally chosen. The
ground for this interpretant is a kind of basic
semantic hygience: to stop “this morally indefensible
and politically unachievable ‘war on terrorism,’ while intensifying the
struggle against terrorism on all sides by political and nonmurderous
means” (Mesnard y Mendez 2002, 121). The meaning
arrived at here aims to distill the nuances of the genealogy without renouncing
responsibility, that is, without shirking the conception of effects that follow
from choosing particular grounds of determinate interpretants.
Inquiry such as we have engaged in here, prompted by what Peirce
calls the Firstness of new qualities and the Secondness of experienced reaction and brute actuality,
functions in the direction of attempting to break entrenched habits and usher a
more comprehensive, historically informed intelligibility, a step toward
“concrete reasonableness,” relative to current social urgencies and long-term
needs.
Peirce’s semiotic proceeds by a logic
of hypothesis, testing by induction, and its implication in belief-formation. I
can only sketch here the outline of this logic in operation. The search for
meaning is a matter of formulating a synthetic inference, by abduction, in
real-life situations. What do we think of the consequences or effects of
choosing a certain ground for our interpretants,
pressured by our needs and desires? We are far removed here from the
epistemological skepticism of Locke and the dualistic idealism of Descartes.
Unlike the ideas perceived introspectively in Descartes’ mind, whose meaning is
intuited or immediately known, the meaning of a sign, although a thought (Thirdness as mediation), is not self-evident. We have to
interpret the sign by a subsequent thought or action to know what it means. For
example, the crashing of the planes on the twin towers in
One might pose the
following questions: If objects are signs that suffuse the universe, what is
there left that is not a sign? What of the somebody,
the observer or interpreter of the cycle of sign-actions? Peirce
answered that “the word or sign which man uses is the man himself....my
language is the sum total of myself, for the man is
the thought” (Sebeok 1986, 41). The self is
manifested in a sign relation; the known universe is constituted in thought
which is equivalent to the triadic sign-action. From the perspective of Peirce’s semiotic realism, the world may be said to be
accurately represented by thoughts/signs, thought grasped here as bodily
feeling or action. If thinking is behavior or action, just as historical as
everyday activities, then it is not an absolute free process unconstrained by
natural forces that determine other kinds of human activity.
We have already remarked
that for Peirce thoughts are not immediately
perceived in a soul, mind or self; thought—the Cartesian cogito--is a
relation of signs possessing material properties, as brain process. The “I”
itself is a sign entailing the triadic constituents of signification. However,
the universe cannot be reduced to simple mechanical forces (Secondness)
derived from sheer thisness (Firstness),
a pattern of action and reaction. Knowledge of the universe springs from Thirdness (mediation; law), the intelligence found in semiosis, in the production of meaning: the representation
of one object to a second by a third. Intelligence then is not immediate
spontaneous knowledge of ideas in the mind or soul, nor a dyadic relation
between objects. It is an objective interpretive relation.
Peirce was a realist, not an idealist, who believed that
universals and other relations are real. Truth hinges on the real understood as
something that cannot be changed and stands outside (though partially known)
human inquiry. He insisted on the reality of universals and of all relations,
specifically the relation of representation. He opposed nominalism
as the view that consciousness (percepts) is not the real thing but only the
sign of the thing. Peirce held to the view that “Reals are signs.” In
contrast, deconstruction and post-structuralist
theory generally subscribe to a nominalism that
questions objective reality, general laws. Nominalists
reduce reality to individual facts, decentering
phenomena into dyadic relations artificially fashioned by subjective will or
textual fiat. Early in life Peirce reflected that
“just as we say that a body is in motion, and not that motion is in a body we
ought to say that we are in thought, and not that thoughts are in us” (1991,
11). In old age, Peirce advised William James that
“one must not take a nominalistic view of Thought as
if it were something that a man had in his consciousness.... It is we that are
in it, rather than it is any of us” (CSP 8: 189).
Artifice of
Comprehension
We now come to appreciate
the strength of Peirce’s semiotics as a speculative
instrument for understanding the dynamics of representation and its role in
knowledge-production. Its value may be demonstrated in the analysis of thought,
not the analysis of verbal language (the arbitrary machine of differance made paradigmatic by the Saussure-oriented postmodernists). Thought is taken here to
be the signifying process of inference, the methodology of meaning-production.
The meaning of the sign is not always and necessarily arbitrary because it
depends on the thought that interprets it; numerous interpretants
predicate real relations between signs and their objects, as in the case of
indices (for example, weathercocks). Nor is it correct to assume that
conventional symbols (such as a red stop sign) are arbitrarily interpreted; the
interpretant has to translate it correctly, or expose
herself to real risks. In short, be warned that reading/understanding entails
real sometimes deadly consequences. In this connection, James Hoopes offers this insight: “Peirce’s
semiotic therefore allows for realistic recognition that human life and society
are to a significant degree a matter not only of freedom but also of
constraint, a matter of people being shoved this way or that by bullets and
ballots, a surplus or shortage of land, the rise and fall of technologies and
industries, and so on. On the other
hand, Peirce’s monism and semiotic realism allow for
some freedom or, rather, a role for thought. By explaining how thought is
action, Peirce’s semiotic makes it possible to
understand why thinking, language, and culture are real historical
forces” (1991, 12). Again, here, the goal of “concrete reasonableness” compels
the thinker to judge not individual thoughts but habits of argument, habits of
forming intelligible and appropriate responses to signs, bearing in mind that
what enables the intelligibility or meaningfulness of signs are the
consequences, effects, and future experiences that they produce.
This is where the old
traditional problem of mind-body dualism, the antithesis of consciousness and
objective reality, may be fully elucidated if not converted to propaedeutic use. We confront the perennial themes of
classic philosophical controversies. In Peirce’s
philosophy, intellectual activity as real action produces effects under
determinate conditions. Social institutions (governments, corporations, media, cultural practices) can be understood as thought unfolded in
a process of sign interpretation, the result of a process of multiple
intelligences—in short, semiotic syntheses of the thoughts of groups and
communities. Society can then be
comprehended as a collective human process that subsumes any focus on the local
or particular. Unlike the postmodern nominalists, Peirce’s approach allows the study of society, culture and
history to become an objective science not in the narrow mechanistic or
positivist sense but in a genuinely dialectical mode where human rational
agency participates in the discovery of truth in historically specific
situations. Dialectical also because thought or intelligence demonstrates its
real creative force not in absolute
“free play,” in undecidable cyborg
self-fashioning divoced from history and nature, but
within the constraints of the real world in which we live (the universe of Thirdness) and the reciprocally interactive logic of
necessity and chance.
Toward a Pragmaticist Aesthetics
Richard Shusterman (1992) has propounded a “pragmatist aesthetics”
based primarily on John Dewey’s instrumentalism. Here I can only initiate a
prolegomenon for a “science” of pragmaticist
aesthetics based on Peirce’s logic of sign-production
as described earlier.
From the perspective of Peircean semiotics, how do we read a literary work, a text
like Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost which renders with lyrical realism
the anatomy of terror in
Before commenting on the
novel, I want to sketch the background for understanding the literary text as a
semiotic phenomenon possessing iconic, indexical and symbolic properties. Kant
demonstrated that the faculty of understanding deploys a priori concepts to
produce the unity of a manifold of sensuous impressions. This is accomplished
through a transcendental deduction. Peirce begins
with a pure act of attention that generates universal concepts as “the present,
in general,” as well as the consciousness of some “It,” analogous to
Aristotle’s substance or what Greek metaphysics designated as “logos.” This
“It” is prior to any act of comparison and discrimination, functioning as the
subject to which any and all predicates apply. This “It” can be grasped through
impressions that present it when they are reduced to the unity of a proposition
which requires the logical and grammatical function of the copula (the copula
translates to “either actually is or would be”). “Being implies an indefinite
determinability of the predicate,” as in the observation that a stove may be
black, iron, heavy, hot, in the corner, and so on. Cognition is thus based on
predication (being, in contrast to substance which is not the Kantian “noumenon” ). We cannot collapse
being (predication) and substance; there is no essence behind appearance: “The
thing in itself is precisely what we do see, and since it is substance, its
reality is not ever in question, only its intelligibility: we bring it into
being by understanding in some light” (Leroy 1994, 561).
There is thus no need for
a Kantian transcendental analysis or a hierarchical Hegelian dialectic in Peirce’s theory. The quality abstracted from an “It”
retains its character in any occurrence and preprares
the way for the explanation of a truth claim. In the proposition “The stove is black,”
the quality (Firstness) abstracted or prescinded from the stove as the precise respect in which
the experience is available to thought. Peirce points
out two distinct moments in this experience: first, reference to a “ground,”as in the focus on color rather than weight or
temperature of the stove. Second, the reference to a “correlate,” whereby the
specific quality (say, “black”) is abstractable so as
to be applicable to other things, such as black shoes, black pots, comparable
to what is seen in the stove. What this demonstrates is that our capacity to
make comparisons needs, in addition to the related thing, the ground and the
correlate, a “mediating representation” or “interpretant”
that can be addressed to someone (including ourselves). This mode of analysis lays the foundation for
Peirce’s theory of pragmaticism
as an epistemology and ontology: Firstness signifies
quality, a feeling, a possibility. Secondness
signifies an individual apprehended as a resistance to and interaction with its
environment, embodying a possibility as actuality. Thirdness refers to
a general term a rule, a law or a “habit” that correspoends
to the fallible but determinate knowledge of a regularity or principle (CSP
8.264-69).
Applying this triad of
categories, signs or representations are divided into icon, index and symbol.
Icon is a sign based on resemblance to its object, possessing some character
contained in or expressed by an instance of the icon. Index is a sign based on
correspondence to fact, some existential relation into which the instance
enters (for the indexical sign in cinema, see Wollen
1972). Symbol is a sign of generality which is connected not only to the ground
and object but also to the interpretant. Symbol as a
sign function assumes both quality (in reference to a ground) and the
existential relations of a particular object or situation; symbol is also
specific in referring to an interpretant, a cognitive
moment, determined by Firstness and Secondness but not limited to either. Meaning derives from
representations that involve the triadic categories, not any binary relation
between signifier and signified.
Peirce’s pragmaticism elaborates
the consequences that follow from a “first” being accessible by reference to a
ground; thus, we are instructed to pay attention to what specific aspect of a
phenomenon we are noticing or representing. Reasoning by inferences does not
allow unlimited “free play,” following Peirce’s
reminder: “The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total
of all general modes of rational conduct that, conditionally upon all the
possible different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance
of the symbol” (CSP 5: 438). Meaning is not infinitely deferred but is
conceived as a continuous process of inference or reasoning in communities of
inquiry. While the heterogeneity of circumstances and desires influence these
communities, the mode of rational inquiry implies a normative ethics and
aesthetics to be scientific. Belief arises from the process of inquiry and
experiment that should be pursued freely without the threat of heresy from the
gatekeepers of orthodoxy—since beliefs are always tested and proved/disproved,
as a commitment to a “concretely reasonable” world.
The categories lead to Peirce’s three trichotomies that
refine his definition of signs. In the first division, a sign is, for the interpretant, either a qualisign, a sinsign or a legisign, depending upon whether it is a quality, an actual
object, or a law. In the second trichotomy, the ground of the relation constitutes signs to
be icons, by reason of similarity, indices by reason of an existential
connection, and symbols by reason of the habit of association, thus showing
regularity and law. In the third trichotomy, the
object of the sign is, for the interpretant,
considered a rheme (qualitative possibility), a dicisign (actual existence), or an argument (law,
representing the object in its character of sign).This table illustrates the
triadic relations in terms of the categories (after Sheriff 1989, 67):
Phenomenological Ontological or
material categories
or formal categories
|
Now, from the perspective
of Peirce’s semiotics, every art-object is an icon (Firstness) whose aesthetic value resides in the harmony of
its intrinsic qualities. The interpretant of the art/icon is a feeling or complex of
emotions, the subjective correlative of the objective properties embodied in
the art-work. E. F. Kaelin argues that the aesthetic
sign is a rhematic iconic qualisign,
“a quality, or a work of art under the aspect of its qualitative wholeness,
serving as a sign of a distinct qualitative possibility by virtue of a similarity
between the two” (1983, 226). In John
Sheriff’s view, literary art is “a representamen of
possibility experienced as Rhematic Symbol” (1989,
78). A novel, poem or story presents us with signs of immediate consciousness,
feelings, qualities, rhemes, in instants of time, as
we read without sustained reflection or analysis. However, while the interpretant of an art-object are signs of ontological Firstness (Rheme), separated
phenomenal elements which are merely potential, this aesthetic experience becomes
an object of reflection, inference, thought. The interpretant
(Rheme) becomes a new representamen
that determines a new interpretant (another Rheme, Proposition or Argument). So the reader undergoes
the experience of immediate consciousness in the first moment, then transforms this sign-process into a new sign, and so
on.
Given the dynamic nature
of signs constituting a literary text, the text as we read will continue to
generate a series of interpretants within specific
parameters, frames of intelligibility, or “language-games.” A sentence in a
text such as “Cain killed Abel” can be read as a Rheme
or Proposition depending on what ground the sign relates to its interpretant. The sentence may have the form of a
proposition, but they do not refer to facts or actual existents; they function
as signs of immediate consciousness registering aspects of the “It,” the
knowable reality subtending experience. They are, as Peirce
asserts, “symbols for a level of reality which cannot be reached in any other
way...So the poet in our days—and the true poet is the true prophet—personifies
everything, not rhetorically but in his own feelings. He tells us that he feels
an affinity for nature, and loves the stone or the drop of water” (1958, 13).
Art is then not just a set of formal properties separated from the real;
experience is broader than the signs in our conscious thought, an experience in
the world of signs whose complex apprehension or transcription of reality is
made more accessible by artistic mediation.
In reading a literary
text, we move from Rheme (Firstness)
to Dicent Sign (Secondness)
and Argument (Thirdness). We can reason and argue on
the basis of interpretants that translate the rhematic symbol, even though, following Peirce’s
doctrine of fallibilism, we cannot arrive at
“absolute certainty concerning questions of fact” (CSP 1:149). While there are
no rules or objective standards to determine the grounds for choosing interpretants, the practice of reading/interpretation is
not wholly subjective, relativist or nominalist. Why
we choose a certain framework, paradigm or language-game can be explained by
prior choices and commitments that can be rationally examined and evaluated.
Questioning and analysis, at some point, must come to an end for us to act on
certain beliefs “and begin from there as rational human beings” (Sheriff 1989,
94).
For Peirce,
the terminal goal of semiosis is the emergence of “concrete
reasonableness” and its embodiment in a community of inquirers open to the
impact of experience, the intractable factuality of an objective world, the
historicity of life, and the influence of traditions. This follows from Peirce’s insight that the ultimate foundation of meaning is
not found in arbitrary conventions but in the rectifiable process of
interpretation. Such process leads to the shaping of general habits and the
correction and improvement of traditions based on a “critical common-sensism” (Rochberg-Halton 1986,
50).
Narrative as Argument
and Symbol
Let us turn now to Anil’s
Ghost with Peirce’s experimental optic. Ondaatje’s novel centers on
the pursuit of truth—the structure and totality of social conditions and
personal relationships in their spatiotemporal unfolding. The fable
deals with the search for the identity of victims of state or collective
terrorism, a quest that also uncovers the history (archaeology, genealogy) of
the protagonists in the national crisis of
Anil Tissera,
the western-trained forensic scientist sent by the UN to investigate human
rights abuses, becomes involved with (among others) two brothers, Sarath Diyasena, an
archaeologist, and his brother Gamini, a doctor
treating the victims of the civil war in Sri Lanka. She has been away for
fifteen years, tied to her birthplace less by memory than by a passion to help
and serve a larger good. Both brothers know first-hand the violence of torture,
cruel murders, and other humiliations. But there are also tensions and
disparities between them, conflicts emblematic of the larger ethnic and class
war raging around them. Towards the end of the novel, the anonymous skeleton of
a victim that Anil and Sarath had recovered is
identified as Ruwan Kumara, a rebel sympathizer. The
novel does not end there; after presenting their findings before a government
panel, and before the episode when Gamini confronts
the corpse of his brother, a victim of official treachery and revenge, we have
a short scene where the two brothers succeed in talking comfortably to each
other “because of her presence. So it had seemed to her.” The point of view in
this passage, that of the expatriate Anil, allows her a synthesizing angle or
vantage point from which to make sense of her own detached but also involved
relation to what is going on in her once beloved homeland, to her past as well
as to her future:
It
was their conversation about the war in their country and what each of
them had done during it and what each would not do. They were, in retrospect,
closer than they imagined.
If she were to step into another life now,
back to the adopted country of her choice, how much would Gamini
and the memory of Sarath be a part of her life? Would
she talk to intimates about them, the two
At
one point that night, she remembered, they spoke of how much they loved their
country. In spite of everything. No Westerner would
understand the love they had for the place. ‘But I could never leave here,’ Gamini had whispered.
‘American movies, English books—remember
how they all end?’ Gamini asked that night. ‘The
American or the Englishman gets on a plane and leaves. That’s it. The camera
leaves with him. He looks out of the window at
Some readers have applied Gamini’s sardonic remarks on the novel itself. This choice
of an interpretant is grounded on the expectation
that postmodern artists are more self-conscious and reflexive. But this is to
dismiss the framing angle of Anil, the vehicle through which Gamini’s voice is registered, preventing it from being a
utopian free-flowing signifier. There is some ambiguity as to whom Gamini is directing his utterance, to his brother or to
Anil; the
combination “American movies, English books,” a complex quasi-indexical dicent sign for Western consumer voyeurism, metonymically
implicates Anil and her European sponsor. The whole scene, however, may be
taken as symbolic of the novel’s attempt to construct a community, beginning
with the restoration of ties between the brothers up to the problematic reinscription of Anil’s visit into her own life-history as
an uprooted Sri Lankan, into the disrupted lives of her compatriots. We are
faced with examining the novel as a legisign of the
artist’s (including Ananda Udugama)
endeavor to oppose the terror of isolation and separation, alienation, ethnic
exclusion, demonization of any person as “terrorist,”
and, last but not least, anonymous disappearance/death.
What needs underscoring
here is the rheme of speculation, that feeling of
quasi-nostalgia and regret, that Anil is experiencing as she muses what it
would be like to be already distant and removed from the scene. It is a moment
of suspension that we are witnessing here, the interpretant
of these signs rendering Anil listening (playing the addressee) to words
exchanged between the brothers. Sarath is not quoted,
but Gamini is given the last words about his love for
his country, and how Western visitors claiming to be experts only reveal their
stupidity and arrogance. Or is that depiction of the scene from
Interminable Inquiry
A concluding remark may
return us to the quest for knowledge and truth via representation. What then is
the rationale for structuring of the narrative in this specific manner? Numerous reviews and commentaries have
converged on the judgment that the novel does not explicitly choose any side.
One writer observes that Ondaatje “ensures that no side emerges unstained: the
government, the Tamil separatists, or the insurgents to the south” (Singh
2000); another commends the author when he “reveals the depths of his
homeland’s adversity with a scientist’s distance” (Barnett 2000). Another thinks that the author “has no clear political
position...and appeals to conscience only by depicting he extremes of fear and
violence that war engenders” (Champeon 2003).
These opinions diverge from signs of partisanship which are ignored for the
sake of endorsing a putative neutrality, for example:
“Yet the darkest Greek tragedies were innocent compared with what was happening
here. Heads on stakes. Skeletons dug out of a cocoa
pit in Matale” (Ondaatje 2000, 11). Consider also Gamini’s psychic condition as he examines his brother’s
lifeless body after he discovered the shattered hands: “He had seen cases where
every tooth had been removed, the nose cut apart, the eyes humiliated with
liquids, the ears entered. He had been, as he ran down the hospital hallway,
most frightened of seeing his brother’s face. It was the face they went for in
some cases. They could in their hideous skills sniff out vanity” (2000,
289-90). Here, the signs of
“terror,” “terrorism,” and their cognates find their charged
sensory manifestations in these rhematic symbols and
their interpretants.
We can of course allude
further to numerous historical and documentary accounts of the situation in
The relevant context for understanding the
art-work can be enlarged and offered for inspection. The final interpretant—in Peirce’s view,
“the effect the Sign would produce upon any mind upon which circumstances
[history, artistic techniques, biography, and other contextual information]
should permit it to work out its full effect” (1985, 413; see Fitzgerald 1966,
124-25)—would deploy such information provided by historical accounts as
elements of the hermeneutic circle or horizon to help us appraise the cogency
of all the “possibles”
rendered in the narrative.
We can indeed anticipate a
range of possible meanings/interpretants we can
formulate for this particular scene, or for any other pivotal episode, as a representamen in a sequence of representamens,
and for the novel as a whole. As I have argued, however, that range can not be
infinite nor arbitrary since the over-all principle of “concrete
reasonableness” (the logic of abduction) imposes a
provisional end to this phase of the inquiry. The knowable reality which the
art of the novel strives to represent is not an indeterminable, mysterious “something”;
to the extent that the representation exhibits the “power to live down all
opposition,” the interpretant can grasp the “true
character of the object... The very entelechy of being lies in being representable,” Peirce insists;
indeed, “a symbol is an embryonic reality endowed with power of growth into the
very truth, the very entelechy of reality” mediated through the community of
interpreters (1976, 262).
Knowledge and reality, “cognizability” and being, are synonymous terms for Pierce
(CSP 5:257). His critique of meaning ultimately directs us to fix our attention
on the habits of thinking and action precipitated by our act of reading,
effects with practical bearings in everyday life. Perceptions and habits of
inference generating knowledge/truth always take place within the domain of semiotic
representation (Habermas 1971, 98; Moore and Robin
1994). Aesthetics, for Peirce, is nothing else but
“the theory of the deliberate formation of such habits of feeling (i.e., of the
ideal)” which he also called “the play of Musement”
after Schiller’s Spieltrieb (Brent
1998, 53; Feibleman 1969, 392). Reading Anil’s Ghost and analyzing the
repertoire of interpretants of politically loaded
terms such as “terrorism” may be said to constitute those significant practices
that challenge not only our hermeneutic skills and capabilities of construing perceptions
and translating perceptual judgments; they also elicit signs of whether we, and
others in the collaborative enterprise, embody what Peirce
calls “an intelligence capable of learning by experience” (1955, 98; see
Sheriff 1994).
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