Preface: Humanism and Semiotics
Humanism is the position of preserving and advancing the agency of all humans. As such, it is the universalised form of the disposition of protecting the agency of a group of people in a ‘radius of care’ - which has been 'expanding' its justificatory power, as a shadow, alongside the field of social interaction since our primitive days - from social units self-justifying to its composing members as the defender of the agency of all tribesmen, to now, "ideologies" justifying as the defenders of the agency of all men at all within the global economic social field. Humanism, if we are to separate it from the ideological baggage we apprehend it with, is the universalised variation of the disposition that concerns itself with the agency of a group's composing members - it is the force of universal emancipation.
Following from this, a motivation rooted in this humanistic impulse reveals itself as the justificatory force of the most powerful modern social movements: both liberalism and Marxism justify themselves as such.
The position that follows is accepting humanism distilled from the ideological baggage it arrives with. That requires the correct understanding of what universal emancipation looks like materially, as well as a way of uncovering the most effective means to these ends. We can only attain these understandings through scientific means, through an intellectually honest epistemology. Therefore, any humanism of value is necessarily a scientific humanism.
Humanism, when it exists only as the implied justificatory impulse behind a social movement, has demonstrably failed to vindicate itself. The history of movements organised around emancipatory aims is overwhelmingly a history of those aims being subordinated to the reproduction of the movements themselves. Why is this the case? What is the process behind this subordination?
To reach an answer, let us address the famous "fundamental problem of philosophy," the solving of which will lead us to a clearer approach to understanding reality, and finally, to a socio-semiotic analysis and to a new approach of attaining humanistic ends.
What can we lay down as the fundamental bases toward the study of what is real? There have been the so-called "materialists" and "idealists" - the former stating that reality is, at base, composed of "matter," and that consciousness and ideas are derivative of material processes; the latter stating that "ideas," mind, or similar formulations constitute the primary substance of reality - they instead see matter being secondary or derivative. They differ on what the fundamental substance of reality is, what is that which is not contingent on anything else for existence?
But the gap between these two fundamental approaches is in understanding the objects of "matter" and "ideas." They are two very loaded categories, and leave behind a toxic trail of misconceptions – and this 'fundamental question of philosophy' is, actually, better dissolved than solved through a semiotic clarification of what these categories actually refer to.
What are "ideas"? What is their actual status? Ideas don't exist in an abstract world in the clouds - they simply function as signs. They are forms that refer to other forms. And systems of these signs create the relational system through which we think at all. Their study is the study of semiosis.
Signs hold a "primacy" over matter only insofar as they are what matter mediates through in consciousness, despite being materially embedded, materially constrained, and producing material effects. So, signs are not opposed to "matter" - they are a specific kind of material process that operates in consciousness through what we understand as "meaning." And matter to the mind is the representamen - the sense-data through which the world is given to us - while ideas are the interpretants produced through this encounter: both of which we will soon look at formally. They are two moments within semiosis and we can understand neither in isolation from the other.
This means that semiosis is the level at which the supposed opposition between matter and ideas ceases to hold. Its study is therefore necessary for us to grasp material reality at all.
To now establish what is clear so far: material reality exists independently of consciousness; people enter into real social relations, produce the conditions of their lives, and reproduce them historically. Consciousness is born through matter, and cannot exist as "pure consciousness," yet material primacy is not linear determination of thought. Language as such is not primary, but rather, what enabled language in the first place is - our ability to work through abstract, relational signs, our capacity for semiosis. Stable sign systems through which social practice is organised arise from this.
The first task, then, is to understand the terminology of how signs operate, how they function, and how they relate to the material world. To do this we will begin with C. S Peirce's triadic model of the sign.
1. Peircian Anatomy of the Sign
Semiosis is not reducible to language and it also did not begin with language even though language is the most important 'semiotic motor' for social work in society. A baby that reaches for the face of their parent is working semiotically far before the baby speaks a language - the face would be a representamen of safety or presence as its object, the reaching behaviour would be the interpretant. Does semiosis encompass everything, then? What isn't a semiotic process? Let us look at a plant turning towards light - that is not semiosis, since it is a fixed mechanical response to a stimulus with no mediating step in which the stimulus is taken as something. Semiosis needs the relation between the representamen and interpretant to be mediated, that the sign is responded to as a sign and not just a cause.
What matters is that, socially, only humans are capable of semiosis at the level of advanced symbolic systems.
The sign is not an "object" that exists in isolation. It is also not a mental “content” that resides in the subject. We should, analytically, treat a sign strictly as a part of the process of semiosis which denotes sign-action, meaning the production, interpretation, transmission, reproduction of meaning. The sign is not static.
Someone familiar with semiotics might expect the Saussurian dyadic pairing of signifier (sound-image) and signified (concept). But this model is not particularly useful for the coming socio-semiotic analysis: it can offer a formalisation of the internal structure of the sign but it does not for how signs function socially. Saussure tells us what a sign means but not what a sign does. His model is structural but semiosis is processual because signs do not just "mean," they also produce effects, generate action, and reproduce themselves across time. For this, we require a triadic model, which Peirce provides for us.
Peirce's triadic process has the three following components:
- The representamen: that which functions as the sign, i.e. the form that stands in for something else within semiosis.
- The object: that to which the sign refers, not as a thing-in-itself, but insofar as it is taken up within the sign relation.
- The interpretant: the effect produced by the sign, which determines how the sign is understood and how it may guide further interpretation or action.
The interpretant requires our careful attention as it is the least intuitive element of the triad. The interpretant is not "the interpretation," so, not what someone privately "thinks" the sign means. It is the effect produced by the sign: this can be a thought, yes, but also a habit, a disposition, an emotional response, as well as a further sign - so, importantly, an interpretant can itself become a representamen for even further semiosis. One sees a red light - the interpretant is the understanding that passage is prohibited. But this understanding itself becomes a sign producing further effects: one checks the mirror, presses the brake, feels annoyed at the delay. Each of these is a further interpretant, each can generate further semiosis. Meaning is therefore never "final," every interpretant opens further semiosis. In social reality, semiosis is stabilised by what we can call "codes", which constrain which interpretants are socially operative, which we will look into.
It also cannot be overstated that this triadicity is non-reducible: none of the three components can function as a sign in isolation! The sign relation cannot be decomposed into a set of Saussurean dyadic relations, because meaning is an emergent property of semiosis itself.
This is further why the dyadic model is insufficient - without the interpretant, one cannot explain how a sign produces action, only how it "means" in the abstract. And without a processual account of semiosis, one cannot explain how meaning shifts: so, the same word, gesture, or symbol will produce different effects in different contexts.
Let's imagine a handshake: the extended hand is the representamen, its object is social acknowledgment or goodwill, and the interpretant is the disposition to reciprocate - to extend one's own hand. But this interpretant is not reducible to the physical gesture perceived. The same extended hand in a different context, like from a stranger in a dark alley, or from an enemy across a negotiating table, will produce a different interpretant entirely. The sign relation is not fixed mechanically since it is stabilised.
We comprehend the world through signs rather than through raw sensation. The sign "tree" is not the physical object but the form through which we identify and compare a class of material objects as "trees." This mediation extends far beyond language: rules, expectations, value forms, roles - the whole structure through which social reality is rendered intelligible are semiotic. These sign systems are, again, not immaterial: they produce material effects, operate under material constraints, and are shaped by historically specific conditions. But they possess relative autonomy and internal regularity, and cannot be dismissed as irrelevant byproducts of material relations.
Beyond the triad
We have established that all signs consist of a representamen, an object, and an interpretant, but not all signs relate to their objects in the same way. Peirce found three fundamental types of sign: they are based on how the representamen connects to its object: the icon, the index, and the symbol.
An icon relates to its object by resembling it, through sharing qualities with it. A portrait resembles the person it depicts, or a map resembles the territory it represents. A diagram of a molecular structure resembles the structure itself. They are connected through similarity - if you destroyed every convention in the world, an icon would still signify, because the resemblance is intrinsic to it.
An index relates to its object through a causal connection - for example, smoke is an index of fire. It isn't an icon, since its connection isn't through smoke looking like fire. Instead its connection is from the understanding that fire produces smoke.
A symbol relates to its object through convention, so through an established rule, habit, or social agreement. The word "tree" has no resemblance to a tree and no causal connection to one. It signifies only because a community of speakers has stabilised this association over time. Most of language operates symbolically. If we remove the convention, then the sign becomes meaningless.
These three types are evidently not mutually exclusive categories because real signs are usually mixtures, a traffic light - our earlier example - is partly indexical (since its physical presence at an intersection connects it to the flow of traffic it regulates) and partly symbolic (the red-means-stop, green-means-go code is fully conventional; there isn't anything inherent to the colour red that means "prohibited"). Language is mostly symbolic but contains iconic elements (like in onomatopoeia, "bzzz," "bang," "hiss", and others, where the sound of the word resembles the sound it refers to) and indexical elements (words like "this" and "here" that point to something present in the situation of utterance). Peirce's trichotomy describes dominant tendencies inside signs so we shouldn't treat them as rigid boxes.
For what concerns us what matters is the code-dependent symbolic dimension, for this is the layer of social life - we live through signs of rules, roles, value forms, labels - almost entirely symbolic! This is why codes are so important in everything that will follow: the question of how codes are stabilised, reproduced and altered is, in root, the question of social organisation itself.