Preface

Humanism is the position of preserving 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 all "countrymen," to all men at all with a global economic social field. Humanism is the universalised form of this impulse: called the humanistic impulse. It is its ever-expanded version.

As such, humanism is the origin of all major justificatory forces of social movements: liberalism is fundamentally humanistic, as is communism, socialism, anarchism, and even nationalism in its self-justification as defender of a people's agency. The subject is always a group’s agency.

And despite seeing what civilisation has produced, and continues to produce, we still feel as though we “choose” a humanistic position. Is this an illusion of free will generated by our external conditions - which is most probable - or not? Ultimately, it does not matter, since humanism is, in abstract, a voluntary position of protecting man’s agency, and is only necessitated by our voluntary “will,” even though it has a material root.

The chief criterion of value in any "ethical system" is whether or not the desired outcomes are stably produced. Reliably producing humanistic outcomes requires a correct understanding of the material world we operate in and of the humanistic ends we seek: and we can only attain said understandings through scientific means - through an intellectually honest epistemology. Therefore, any humanism of value is necessarily a scientific humanism.

Why have movements built on humanistic foundations produced antihumanist results so consistently? The signs and symbols of universal emancipation justified live as justificatory forces of regimes of terrible antihuman repression. What is the actual scientifically analysable process that makes movements that were humanistic in justification antihumanist in practice? What scientific work have we done to establish that the ideological labels we attach to ourselves actually produce the humanistic outcomes they promise? What mechanisms ensure that they continue to do so once they are embedded in real social structures?

To reach an answer, we must first address a problem that has blocked clear thinking about social reality for centuries, the solving of which will lead us to a clearer approach to understanding reality, and finally, to a socio-semiotic analysis and approach of attaining humanistic ends. We should begin with humility: science requires that we minimize our unverified assumptions about reality, and that we work with what we can know with confidence. We do not have absolute certainty of what reality is composed of (the honest admission of this is what birthed science in the first place: the practice of intellectual honesty in understanding the reality surrounding us).

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, with matter being secondary or derivative. Differing between 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, floating, ethereal realm - ideas are semiotic processes - that means that they function as signs, functioning within a process called semiosis. And, as we will soon establish, "ideas," or signs, hold "primacy" in our conscious reality insofar as they are what matter mediates through in consciousness, despite being materially embedded, materially constrained, and producing material effects. So "ideas" are not the opposite of "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 signifier, the sense-data through which the world is given to us - while ideas are the interpretants produced through this encounter. They are not two substances but two moments within semiosis, and we can understand neither in isolation from the other. Staying true to the humility with which we began: we need not, and cannot, claim more than this.

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. Without this science of how meaning is produced, reproduced, and mediated, what progress can we make in engaging the socium? How can we fix the world, how can we do good, if we do not comprehend the very medium through which social reality operates?

To reaffirm what follows plainly: 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. What is central is not language as such, but what enabled language in the first place: the capacity to operate through abstract, relational signs - the capacity for semiosis. From this capacity emerge the relatively stable sign systems through which consciousness and social practice are organised.

Peircian Anatomy of the Sign

Semiosis is not reducible to language, nor did it begin with language, despite language being our central ‘semiotic motor’ for social work. A baby that reaches for their parent's face works semiotically before the baby grasps language: the face is a representamen (something like "safety" or "presence" as its object) and the reaching behaviour is the interpretant. But does semiosis then encompass "everything?" No - because, for example, a plant turning toward light is not semiosis - at least, we have no reason to assume as such: it is a fixed mechanical response. Semiosis requires that the interpretant is not mechanically determined, that one representamen can produce a different interpretant under different conditions.

So, the sign is not an "object" that exists in isolation. It is also not a mental “content” that resides in the subject. For analytic purposes, we should treat a sign strictly as a part of the process of semiosis which denotes sign-action: so, the production, interpretation, transmission, reproduction of meaning. The sign is, then, not static.

(it may seem redundant to formalise signs on a local level: a lot seems "intuitive," but this base is necessary!)

Someone familiar with semiotics expect the Saussurian dyadic pairing of signifier (sound-image) and signified (concept). But this model is not particularly analytically useful for 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 understated 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.

Imagine a red traffic light - the physical light is not a sign in and of itself. It becomes a sign only insofar as it functions within semiosis. The illuminated red light would be the representamen (the signifier, that which functions as the sign) as it stands in for something else. Its object would be the understanding that passage is prohibited - and the interpretant is the effect produced by this sign: there is a clear disposition to act, to stop.

Again, this interpretant is not reducible to the fact that light was perceived. The same physical stimulus won't produce the same interpretant outside the system of traffic. Nor is the interpretant a 'private mental image.' It is socially stabilised and it can also predictably guide action.

We comprehend the world through these signs, rather than by understanding it directly through our senses. Our capacity for comparative thought necessitates us to work through them. Let's the sign "tree" as an example - it is not equivalent to the physical object itself. It is a sign through which we identify and compare a class of material objects that we recognise as "trees." And this mediation is not limited to language: again, our entire comprehension of social reality is based in signs through rules, expectations, value forms, in all the basic ways in which the world is rendered intelligible - ‘understanding’ itself - forming mental variables and their interrelations - is semiotic. Do these signs and sign systems get determined outside of historical material processes? Not at all - they have a layer of abstraction in analysis, yes, but they are not immaterial: they produce material effects, operate under material constraints, and are shaped by historically specific conditions of social existence and production. They are material forces. The processes which arise around the formation and reproduction of signs have relative autonomy and internal regularity. Since they constitute their own specific level of social reality (the window through which we interact with the world) we cannot adequately understand them just as analytically useless 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 it's connection isn't through smoke looking like fire, but 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.