Eero Tarasti

Eero Tarasti
Sein und Schein

Eero Tarasti
Sein und Schein
|
Explorations in Existential Semiotics
ISBN 978-1-61451-751-1
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Preface to Sein und Schein
I have the feeling that the title of this book, once conceived in a talk with Anke
Beck, my publisher, should indeed correspond to the contents. What is namely
proposed here is that I start with rather philosophical reflections on what could
be called ‘ontologico-transcendental’ issues of existential semiotics. So this is cer-
tainly about ‘Being’. Yet, what follows is, chapter by chapter, more about ‘Ap-
pearance’, i.e., the empirical world in which we live, from cultural case studies
to performance and even such ‘lesser arts’ as gastronomy.
The Reader may ask what the unifying factor behind such diversity then is.
The answer is: the new phase of the existential semiotics, this paradigm of sign
studies which I launched as early as 2000, with the first monograph published in
English by Indiana University Press. It was followed by expanded and deepened
versions in different languages in which the original theory was elaborated on
in many directions. These were Fondements de la sémiotique existentielle 2009
(Paris: L’Harmattan) and Fondamenti di semiotica esistenziale 2009 (Roma, Bari:
Giuseppe Laterza); moreover, they also appeared in these years in Bulgarian and
Chinese; and translations into Turkish and Farsi are in process.
In this avenue towards renewal of already existing ‘classical’ approaches to
semiotics, my theory is growing from the roots of European semiotics, and partic-
ularly the so-called Paris school of semiotics, once created by A. J. Greimas. In this
path, a.o., the semiotic square became a ‘Z-model’, and likewise many elements
were changed. However, in this situation of ‘neosemiotics’ as I have called it, one
can also continue to be Greimassian, Lotmanian, Peircean without worries – the
classical theories do not lose their validity in the study of our Dasein. However, the
new theory offers perhaps a broader context, or it is like Greimas put it ‘englobant’,
surrounding.
On the other hand, existential semiotics stems from the continental philo-
sophy of the line from Kant, Hegel, and Kierkegaard to Heidegger, Jaspers, Arendt,
Sartre, Marcel, and Wahl. What the word ‘existential’ immediately evokes to most
is of course existentialism. Nevertheless, this is by no means to be understood as
any kind of return to existentialism. We never go back, we are in 2015 now, and
the theory written now has to reflect its particular conditions.
What emerges is perhaps an effort to understand basic issues of the contem-
porary world, its ethical and axiological problems, even to propose a theory of
resistance, answering to the same question once proposed by Lev Tolstoi: What
do we have to do? Yet, my conviction is that a sermon does not help; we must have
a theory if we want to get some more lasting effects.
vi | Preface to Sein und Schein
So we are here on the way to a synthesis of both semiotic and philosophical

tradition. It is obvious that we are moving towards the social issues, psychology
of culture; although semiotics is never the same as psychology, its metalanguage
is conceptual. Anyway, issues like Bakhtin’s dialogism, criticism of some cultural
theories are the direction of these reflections. All this without forgetting the rad-
ical consequences which such difficult notions as ‘transcendence’ can bring to
semiotics. However, and after all, is it not true that the whole semiotics is a tran-
scendental art? Every act of communication is the effort of Mr. A to reach the ‘alien
psychic’ (Fremdseelig) consciousness of Mr. B, to paraphrase a little de Saussure.
And every sign, is it not referring to something absent, i.e., transcendental?
Theories grow from other theories and from the works of other scholars. This
is taken into account here with a panorama of precursors of existential semiotics,
where rather amazing names may appear in this context. And all the work of semi-
oticians has been made possible by certain organizing and institutional activities,
which have made this esoteric science something experiential and concrete. This
fact is recalled by the concluding chapter of the book, Can Semiotics Be Organized.
My very special thanks go to all those scholars and institutions with whom
I have been working in these years, from the ISI to the IASS. I am indebted about
this constant dialogue to my colleagues as well as students in many countries
and continents. Rick Littlefield has edited the majority of these chapters. Paul
Forsell has been my irreplaceable help not only in the editorial work but in all
my scholarly life. I warmly thank Kim Keskiivari for the proofreading. I dedicate
this book to my wife, Eila, who has followed and supported it in all of its phases.
My publisher Mouton de Gruyter I thank for a many years’ long, inspiring and
pleasant cooperation.
Helsinki, January 2015 Eero Tarasti

Contents
Preface to Sein und Schein | v
Part I Philosophy: Varieties of Being
1 Existential semiotics today: Sein (Being) and Schein (Appearing) | 3

1.1 Introduction | 3
1.2 A return to basic ideas | 4
1.3 Modalities | 4
1.4 Dasein and transcendence | 5
1.5 Turn-around of Dasein | 8
1.6 Values | 10
1.7 New types of signs | 14
1.8 More on transcendence | 16
1.9 Mimesis | 18
1.10 The subject reconsidered: BEING | 21
1.11 Questions by a subject: From BEING to DOING | 28
1.11.1 Consequences of our varieties of subjectivity | 29
2 On the appearance or the present structure and existential digressions

of the subject | 39
2.2 More on vertical appearance | 42
2.3 More on horizontal appearance | 50
3 Representation in Semiotics | 54
3.1 The relation of representation in semiotics | 54
3.2 Mapping representation | 55
3.3 Nöth’s handbook | 57
3.4 Representation in philosophy – John Deely | 58
3.5 Peirce | 59
3.6 Model theory | 60
3.7 From cybernetics to cultural semiotics | 61
3.8 Representation as function | 63
3.9 The archaeology of Foucault | 64
3.10 Existential semiotic interpretation | 66
viii | Contents
4 The concept of genre: In general and in music | 70

4.1 A semiotic approach to genre in general . . . | 70
4.2 . . . and in music | 83
4.2.1 Before genres | 83
4.2.2 Major genre categories: Art music and popular music | 86
4.2.3 Norms and varieties of music | 88
4.2.4 Genre in musical communication | 89
4.2.5 Transgressing genres | 90
4.2.6 Crises of genres | 91
4.2.7 Cultural reflections | 92
4.2.8 Classics | 93
4.2.9 National versus universal | 93
4.2.10 Social classification and functions | 95
4.2.11 Genre as classification | 97
4.2.12 Recent theories | 98
5 The world and its interpretation | 100

5.1 World and worlds | 100
5.1.1 Philosophers | 101
5.1.2 Artists | 106
5.1.3 Semioticians | 109
5.2 Closing thoughts | 111
6 Signs around Us – Umwelt, Semiosphere and Signscape | 113

6.2 Milieu – Taine | 113
6.3 Surrounding/surrounded | 115
6.4 New models of communication | 117
6.5 Umwelt and Uexküll | 118
6.6 Dasein . . . | 120
6.7 . . . and transcendence | 122
6.8 Semiosphere, Lotman and Ruskin | 124
6.9 Heidegger’s view | 125
6.10 Subject and environment | 128
Part II Doing: Society and Culture
7 Semio-crises in the era of globalisation: Towards a new theory

of collective and individual subjectivity | 133
Contents | ix
7.2 The lesson of semiocrises | 134

7.3 Collective subjectivity or identity as a world view | 137
7.4 Individual subjectivity or the fight between two manners of ‘being’
in the world | 141
8 Ideologies manifesting axiologies | 144

9 Semiotics of resistance: Being, memory, history, and the

counter-current of signs | 152
9.1 Globalization and transcendence | 152
9.2 Globalization as the new civilization: Some signs
of the time | 154
9.3 Aesthetics of resistance | 158
9.3.1 Forces of resistance I: Being | 162
9.3.2 Forces of resistance II: Memory | 167
9.3.3 Forces of resistance III: History | 177
9.4 What are we resisting? | 180
10 Culture and transcendence | 182

10.1 The theory in brief | 184
10.2 Transculturality | 185
10.3 Criticism of British cultural studies | 187
10.4 Language games | 189
10.5 Articulation | 190
10.6 Subject positions | 192
10.7 What Foucault said | 193
10.8 Action | 195
10.9 Cultivating | 196
10.10 Content and Speculation | 198
10.11 The organism | 200
10.12 Generation | 201
10.13 Nature | 202
10.14 Rhizome | 203
10.15 Zemic/Zetic | 205
10.16 Transfer | 206
10.17 Alien-psychic | 208
10.18 Conclusion | 209
x | Contents
Part III Lesser Arts
11 A proposal for a semiotic theory of performing arts | 213

11.1 General observations | 213
11.1.1 Skill | 214
11.1.2 Theory | 214
11.1.3 Time | 218
11.1.4 Emotions | 221
11.1.5 Intentional body | 221
11.1.6 Unpredictability | 223
11.1.7 Schein | 223
11.2 An existential semiotic theory of performance | 227
11.3 Performance in various arts | 233
11.3.1 Performance of the text | 233
11.3.2 Film performance-analysis | 235
11.3.3 Varieties of actor/actress, musician, dancer | 237
12 On culinemes, gastrophemes, and other signs of cooking | 249

12.2 Two historical perspectives | 251
12.3 Semiotic questions about food | 253
12.4 Cooking as a generative course | 256
12.5 An application: cooking in Paris according to Ville Vallgren,
Finnish sculptor and gourmet | 261
Part IV Heimat
13.A Metaphors of nature and organicism | 269

13.A.1 Introduction | 269
13.A.2 What semioticians say about nature | 269
13.A.3 Auguste Comte | 271
13.A.4 German thinkers from Kant to Schiller | 272
13.A.5 Différance | 276
13.A.6 In biosemiotics | 279
13.A.7 Semiogerms | 282
Contents | xi
13.B Metaphors of nature and organicism in the epistemology

of music | 283
13.B.1 On the musically “organic” | 283
13.B.2 Sibelius and the idea of the “organic” | 294
13.B.3 Organic narrativity | 302
14 Finland in the eyes of a semiotician | 306

Part V Precursors
15 From absolute spirit to the community of interpretation: Josiah Royce

(1855–1916), the American classic between Hegel and Peirce | 321
15.1 Josiah Royce as a historical figure | 321
15.2 Why Hegel? | 325
15.3 Back to Royce | 330
15.4 Toward the world of interpretation | 331
15.5 The moral burden of the individual | 334
15.6 Royce’s metaphysics and last insights on interpretation | 339
16 Victoria Lady Welby – A pioneer of semiotic thought rediscovered

by Susan Petrilli | 342
16.2 The challenge of originality | 343
16.3 The idea of “three” | 344
16.4 Royce as Lady Welby’s contemporary | 345
16.5 Welby’s independence as a scholar | 346
16.6 Who is a significian? | 348
16.7 Problematic language | 349
16.8 Metaphors | 351
16.9 How to educate our expressive powers | 351
16.10 Transcendence | 352
17 Vladimir Solovyov | 354

17.1 Background | 354
17.2 Moral philosophy | 357
17.3 Sophia and the World Soul | 362
xii | Contents
18 Russian formalism in the global semiotics – Precursor of the

European branch | 367
18.2 Wassily Kandinsky | 369
18.3 Its key concepts are metaphors from music | 371
18.4 Lev Karsavin (1892–1952) | 378
18.5 Wilhelm Sesemann | 382
18.6 Vladimir Propp | 384
18.7 Mikhail Bakhtin | 388
19 Wilhelm Sesemann in the context of semiotics | 392

20 Roland Barthes or the birth of semiotics from the spirit

of music | 398
21 The right of unfunctionality – Explorations in Ponzio’s

philosophical semiotics | 406
22 São Paulo, Helsinki, New Delhi – The life of José Luiz Martinez | 413
Part VI Practice
23 Can Semiotics be organized? Observations over

a 40-year period | 423
23.2 Beginning: Lévi-Strauss, Greimas . . . and Paris | 424
23.3 The Impact of Thomas A. Sebeok | 425
23.4 Semiotics expands | 427
23.5 Imatra starts: Founding of the ISI | 428
23.6 IASS Continues | 431
23.7 The World Congress in Finland | 433
23.8 From Italy to Bulgaria and Estonia | 435
23.9 The Finnish Network University of Semiotics
as an experiment | 436
23.10 SEMKNOW | 438
23.11 What do we want? | 439
Literature | 441
Index | 455
|
Part I: Philosophy: Varieties of Being
Chapter 1
Existential semiotics today: Sein (Being) and
Schein (Appearing)
1.1 Introduction
Most readers of this book probably know existential semiotics as a relatively new
“school” or approach to general semiotics and philosophy. It is intended to re-
new the epistemic foundations of the theory of signs by rereading the classics of
continental philosophy in the line of Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Heide-
gger, Jaspers, Arendt, and Sartre. Its most salient aspect is the revalorization of
subject and subjectivity, from which it launches new notions such as transcend-
ence, Dasein, modalities, values, Moi/Soi, and other issues soon to be discussed.
It constitutes a kind of ontological semiotics starting from the modality of Being
and shifting toward Doing and Appearing, as well. Those who have followed the
unfolding of existential semiotics may find the latter of these modalities – Appear-
ing – to be a more recent addition to our line of thought, at least as expounded
with the thoroughness it receives here. To prepare for its exposition, let us begin
with the most important aspects of existential semiotics.
The mere notion of an “existential” semiotics evokes many issues in the his-
tory of ideas and the study of signs¹. As such, it is a new theory of studies of
communication and signification, as Eco has defined the scope of semiotics (Eco
1979: 8). But beyond that, the attribute “existential” calls on a certain psycho-
logical dimension – namely, existential philosophy and even existentialism. As
such, the theory involves the phenomenon of transcendence, which may bring to
mind American Transcendentalist philosophers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson,
the writer Henry David Thoreau; certainly these and others can be considered
kinds of pre-existentialist thinkers. On the other hand, it certainly carries a philo-
1 Some twenty years ago I began my attempts to renew the so-called “classical” semiotic ap-
proach and to rethink its epistemological bases. My first publication in this vein was entitled
Existential Semiotics (Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000). Trans-
lated, modified and extended versions of this text have recently appeared: Fondements de la
sémiotique existentielle, trans. Jean-Laurent Csinidis (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2009); and Fondamenti
di semiotica esistenziale, trans. Massimo Berruti (Bari: Laterza Editore, 2009). Moreover, the Bel-
gian review DEGRES published in 2003 a special issue on Sémiotique existentielle, which features
some international reactions to these new theories. Július Fuják edited proceedings from a sym-
posium on Convergences and Divergences of Existential Semiotics (Nitra 2007). Moreover, Jean-
Marie Jacono arranged seminars on existential semiotics in the University of Aix en Provence.
4 | 1 Existential semiotics today: Sein (Being) and Schein (Appearing)
sophical tinge that takes us back to German speculative philosophy, to the time
of Kant, Schelling, Hegel, and thereafter the existentialist line in the proper sense
(i.e., Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Arendt, Wahl, Gabriel
Marcel, etc.). Yet, while the present theory draws inspiration from these classical
sources, one cannot return to any earlier historic phase. The theoretical thought
of 2015 is definitely philosophy in the present time, and in our case it is enriched
by the development of semiotics, particularly throughout the twentieth century.
1.2 A return to basic ideas
The present theoretical and philosophical reflections start from the hypothesis
that semiotics cannot forever remain focused on the classics from Peirce and Saus-
sure to Greimas, Lotman, Sebeok, and others. Semiosis is in flux and reflects new
epistemic choices in the situation of sciences in the 2000s. Hence my own “return”
to existentialism is not bound to classical Hegel, Kierkegaard, Sartre, or Heideg-
ger, but rather it draws inspiration from them and, most of all, situates their ideas
within a semiotics of the present.
Existential semiotics explores the life of signs from within. Unlike most pre-
vious semiotics, which investigates only the conditions of particular meanings,
existential semiotics studies phenomena in their uniqueness. It studies signs in
movement and flux, that is, as signs becoming signs, and defined as pre-signs,
act-signs and post-signs (Tarasti 2000: 33). Signs are viewed as transiting back and
forth between Dasein – Being-There, our world with its subjects and objects – and
transcendence. Completely new sign categories emerge in the tension between
reality, as Dasein, and whatever lies beyond it. Completely new sign categories
emerge. We have to make a new list of categories in the side of that once done
by Peirce. Such new signs so far discovered are, among others, trans-signs, endo-
and exo-signs, quasi-signs (or as-if-signs), and pheno- and geno-signs.
1.3 Modalities
In my earlier theory of musical semiotics (Tarasti 1994: 27, 38–43), I concluded that
music signifies most importantly by means of its modalities, in the Greimassian
sense. Greimas started with his Sémantique structurale (1966), which stemmed
from phenomenology, semantics, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, and Lévi-
Straussian structural anthropology, not to mention Saussure and Hjelmslev. He
launched new concepts such as semanalysis, the actantial model, isotopies, and
so forth. In the late 1970s he put his thought into a generative model (“generative
course”), which proved both powerful and fashionable at that time (Greimas
1979: 157–164). The most radical of his innovations, however, was the discovery
of modalities, to which he referred as the “third semiotic revolution” (the first
being the invention of semantics by Bréal, and second, the structural linguistics
of Saussure). Modalities are the ways in which a speaker animates and colors
his/her speech by providing it with wishes, hopes, certainties, uncertainties,
duties, emotions, and so forth. Larousse’s French Dictionary defines modal-
ity:
Psychic activity that the speaker projects into what he is saying. A thought is not content with
a simple presentation, but demands active participation by the thinking subject, activity
which in the expression forms the soul of the sentence, without which the sentence does
not exist.
Modalities appear in the grammar of some languages as modal or special sub-

junctive verb forms. For instance, in French: when one says, “I have to go to the
bank”, the sentence is rendered “Il faut que j’aille à la banque”, the verb form
indicating the modality of obligation or duty – “must” (devoir) – instilled in the
communication by the locution “Il faut” (it is necessary). The “plain”, unmodal-
ized form would be simply “je vais”, you go. Italian and German are two other
modern languages that feature the subjunctive mood (modality).
The fundamental modalities are Being and Doing. We further distinguish a
third modality, Becoming, which refers to the normal temporal course of events
in our Dasein or life-world (discussed below). Other modalities, in turn, are Will,
Can, Know, Must, and Believe. Here the modalities are to be understood as pro-
cessual concepts. They are the element of “classical semiotics” that remains valid
in the new existential semiotics, precisely because of their dynamic nature.
1.4 Dasein and transcendence
The modalities aptly portray what happens inside what I call Dasein in the model
shown in Figure 1.1 (from Tarasti 2000: 10). The concept of Dasein, a term that
literally means “being-there”, has been borrowed from German philosophy, es-
pecially that of Heidegger and Jaspers (see Jaspers 1948: 6–11, 57–66, 295). Unlike
in Heidegger, for whom Dasein refers primarily to my existence, here it does not
refer only to one subject, Me, but also to Others, and likewise to the objects of our
desire.
Beyond Dasein, beyond the concrete reality in which we live, there is tran-
scendence. The simplest definition of this intriguing notion might be the follow-
ing: The transcendent is anything that is absent in actuality, but present in our
minds.
Figure 1.1: The Model of Dasein
The model also introduces an element crucial to any existential theory: the sub-
ject. This subject, dwelling in Dasein, feels it to be somehow deficient or otherwise
unsatisfactory, and so negates it. This is what Jean-Paul Sartre called néantisation
(Sartre 1943: 44–45). A lack in his/her existence forces the subject to search for
both something more and something different. There are two transcendental acts
in the model, first negation and then affirmation. With this we have the existential
“move” in Dasein (x).
First our subject finds himself amid the objective signs of Dasein. Then the
subject recognizes the emptiness and Nothingness surrounding the existence
from which he has come – that which precedes him and comes after him. The
subject then takes a leap into Nothingness, into the realm of le Néant, described
by Sartre. From here, all of his earlier Dasein seems to have lost its foundation: it
appears to be senseless. This constitutes the first act of transcendence: negation.
The subject does not stop here, but there follows the second act of transcendence,
when he encounters the opposite pole of Nothingness: a universe that takes
on meaning in some supra-individual way, independently of his own act of
signification. This act, affirmation, results in the subject finding what Peirce
called the Ground. It was at first difficult to find a suitable concept to portray
this state. Upon reading the Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov (1965: 348–
349), it became clear that affirmation is what in Gnostic philosophy was called
pleroma or plenitude. This in turn evoked Emerson’s notion of the “Oversoul” and
Schelling’s Weltseele, world soul. The latter, a kind of anima mundi, refers to the
unified inner nature of the world, understood as a living being with the capacity
to desire, conceive, and feel. In short, the world soul constitutes a “modal” entity,
to use our Greimassian vocabulary (Greimas 1979: 230–232).
It must be emphasized that the present model is of a conceptual nature, not an
empirical one. This does not of course exclude it from subsequent psychological,
anthropological, or theological applications. One person has proposed that “tran-
scendental journey” means “a psychedelic trip”; others have compared it to the
act of a shaman in which his soul, after he has eaten hallucinogenic mushrooms,
makes a trans-mundane journey to other realities; and so forth. Our scheme, how-
ever, is philosophical and deals with what Kant called the transzendental rather
than the transzendent (Kant 1787 [1968]: 379).
We can provide the logical operations of affirmation and negation with psy-
chological content and distinguish more subtle nuances of these acts:
Negation, for example, may mean the following:

Abandonment, giving up: One is in a situation in which x appears; the subject
has taken it into its possession but now abandons it, i.e., becomes “disjunc-
ted” from it (formalized as S V O, in Greimassian semiotics; see Greimas 1979:
108).
Passing by: x appears but the subject passes it by.
Forgetting: x appeared, but it is forgotten; it no longer has any impact.
Counter-argument: x appears, but something totally different follows: y; or x ap-
pears and is followed by its negation (inversion, contrast, opposition, etc.).
This corresponds to Greimas’s semiotic square and its categories s1 and s2,
and non-s1 and non-s2 (ibid.: 29–33).
Rejection: x appears, but it is rejected.
Prevention: x is going to appear, but is prevented from doing so.
Removal of relational attributes: x appears, but one eliminates its semes x . . . xn ,
whereafter it becomes acceptable.
Destruction: x appears, but is destroyed.
Collapse, disappearance: x appears but disappears on its own accord, without
our being able to influence it.
Concealment: the appearance of x is hidden, but it nevertheless “is” on a certain
level.
Parody: x appears, but it is not taken seriously, or is taken as an “as-if”.
Mockery: x appears, but one trifles with it; it is ironized, made grotesque.
Dissolution: x appears, but it is reduced to smaller parts; when its total phenom-
enal quality is lost, one “cannot tell the forest from the trees”. In Adorno’s
words: “When one scrutinizes art works very closely, even the most objective
works turn into confusion, texts into words [. . . ] the particular element of
the work vanishes; its abridgment evaporates under the microscopic gaze”
(Adorno 2006: 209, translation mine).
Misunderstanding: x appears, but it is not interpreted as x, but as something else.
Affirmation, in turn, may mean the following:

Acceptance: x appears and we accept it without intervening in it; for example,
when we rejoice in others’ success.
Helping: We may contribute to the fact that x appears.
Enlightenment: We see x in a favorable light.
Revelation of the truth and disappearance of the lie: x appears, and it is recog-
nized as Schein (mere appearance, a lie); conversely, we act in such a way
that allows x󸀠 to appear.
Initiation: We start to strive; we undertake an act so that some positive, euphoric
x appears.
Duration: We attempt to maintain x; for example, by teaching someone.
Completion: x appears as the final result of a process, as the reward of pain;
Schein, now in the sense of “shine” or brilliance, has been attained by labor.
We say more about this later, concerning the modality of Appearing (appar-
ence).
Organic vitality: x erupts; it appears in consequence of an organic process, as
having abandoned itself to the process, as if “riding atop a wave”.
Transfiguration: x radiates something that stems from the background, not from
its own power, but as the effulgence of an invisible reality. For example, take
the bodies in El Greco’s paintings. First we encounter the negation – a body
portrayed as suffering – but behind it a hopeful luminosity.
Victory: x appears as the end of a long struggle; for example, the brilliant C major
at the end of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in C minor.
Opening: the appearance of x means a gateway to possibilities; new worlds open
to us.
Liberation: the appearance of x signifies a breaking of the chains of y or x󸀠 .
1.5 Turn-around of Dasein
Two other aspects of this model relate to how our psyche adapts to his/her exist-
ential situation and journeys. The first of these is evoked by viewing negation as a
kind of alienation or estrangement: when a subject temporarily exits his Dasein in
his transcendental act, the journey can last for whatsoever time span, be it hours,
days, weeks, even years. And it can happen that when he returns to the world of
his Dasein, he finds it changed. Like a spinning globe, it has continued moving
1.5 Turn-around of Dasein | 9
on its own and completely apart from our subject; it has perhaps turned in such
a direction that, when our subject returns, it is no longer the same world. One
may find in our model the solipsism that Dasein exists only for one subject and
that it changes its shape because of his/her existential experiences. But not only
so. For during the transcendental journey, the world may have in the meantime
developed in a new direction. The subject does not return “home” but to a quite
different world from the one that he left. Insofar as we take Dasein as a collective
entity, which consists of subjects and objects, of Others, we encounter the com-
munity and the autonomous development of the collectivity, the changes brought
by history. Our subject can either accept this change and try to adapt to it, or he
may deny it. From the latter case emerges a special opportunity for semiotics of
resistance (discussed in a later chapter). As shown in Figure 1.2, progress does
not mean just going along with the normal course of a journey, but also looking
at alternatives, at what might have happened or have been possible (see Tarasti
2009c: 51, 61–65).
Figure 1.2: The turn-around of Dasein
Second, there is an aspect of our model that opens new avenues after the previous
one. Namely, the arrows can go backward as well. Our subject recalls how Da-
sein was before, and returns to it on the basis of his memory, which retains some
images and ideas from those previous worlds and their phases, as illustrated in
Figure 1.3.
Some of them he may have already forgotten, and similarly the Dasein may
have forgotten him. There is a risk indeed that, if he dwells too long in his position
of resistance and outside the Dasein, then he is forgotten – like a text discarded
and ignored by the collective memory of a culture. This leads to the strong social
Figure 1.3: The counter-current of Dasein
implications of our theory. Real thinkers of resistance are always forgotten and
suppressed. If they were accepted, they would not be what they wanted to be.
Thus, in our model the arrows also go backwards.
1.6 Values
As mentioned earlier, existential semiotics conceives of signs to be in constant

movement between transcendence and Dasein. Depending on their proximity to
Dasein, whether they are approaching it or departing from it, one gets new types
of signs. We have already mentioned pre-signs – ideas or values that have not yet
become concrete signs. Such signs are virtual. When they become manifest as a
sign “vehicle” or an act, they become act-signs. When they make an impact on re-
ceivers, they become post-signs. In their virtual, potential state as transcendental
entities, they can be called trans-signs. These phases correspond to three activities
of the human mind: virtualizing, actualizing, and realizing (notions used by both
Greimas and by Roman Ingarden).
Ultimately, there is an axiological problem with the existence of values. In
the Saussurean tradition values are relative; they are determined only in their
context, as opposed to other values by the linguistic community (Saussure [1916]
1995: 116). In my theory, by contrast, values are transcendental but become signs
via the activities of the subject. In the field of aesthetics, such a view is of course
problematic. How is it possible, say, that the value of a Beethoven sonata existed
before its creation? Was it somewhere waiting for its actualization in Dasein? To
this we may reply that transcendental values do not become a manifest reality
without an agent who actualizes them. When actualization occurs, signs may be
1.6 Values | 11
different from what they were thought to be earlier, when mere pre-signs (Tarasti
2000: 33). Without the help of other modalities – Know, Can, Must, and Will – they
never become concrete. Signs can also be classified into endo- and exo-signs –
either internal or external, respectively, to our subject’s world (ibid.: 37–55).
Let us scrutinize this problem in terms of moral values. The following diagram
summarizes our discussion thus far:
values → modalities → signs
The movement proceeds from left to right, when in semiosis an abstract idea is
formulated and eventually crystallizes as a sign (see Tarasti 2004: 39). But can
we call this process semiosis? To some philosophers, to say that something is a
“sign” is not any recommendation. But on what grounds could we reason that,
just because something has the characteristics of a sign, then it is less “real” or
less valuable? To Peirce’s way of thinking, to become conscious of a sign is a
Second. The French writer Le Clézio says that when we are reading a novel and
exclaim, “Oh this was well said!”, that that is a kind of sign, and it no longer func-
tions. The functionality of signs has become almost an aesthetic slogan in recent
years. But this is the same as stated above – namely, the value-reality escapes our
grasp, and everything becomes mere technical problems of functionality. Some
may say this is the semioticians’ fault. They taught us that everything is sign and
semiosis: there can be disturbances in their functioning, but such flaws can be
corrected with the technical knowledge we have of the functioning of text. Thus,
values remain completely external, and transcendental, and one does not need
to believe in their existence: There are only opinions, language, discourse, but
no transcendental categories. As Greimas said: “Il n’y a pas de vérité, il n’y a que
véridiction” – There is no truth, there are only statements about truth.
All moral philosophers have to deal with Hume, who proposed that no values
can be inferred from facts. From the state of how things are, we cannot logically
infer how they should be. In my existential semiotics, I defend the idea that values
can be transcendental ideas alongside other values that exist outside Dasein. Still,
in some cases and under certain circumstances, they start to exercise their influ-
ence within the Dasein, when a living subject – individual or collective – therein
feels such a value as his own, experiences it as moving him/her into something,
and finally realizes this value as a sign. The British philosopher John Mackie, in
his Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), represents the extreme of value-nominalism.
Different cultures view right and wrong in different ways, such that no independ-
ent value facts exist. All moral statements are thus untrue. Mackie argues that
all objective moral theories make a mistake when they say that one cannot step
outside or above morals if he/she wants to do so. In his view, morality is a special
form of social life, which man and his community create and choose. (This already
sounds rather existential.) Mackie argues that, if moralizing leads to quarrels and
disputes, then morals ought to be forgotten.
Even so, if we insist on the point that moral values exist in transcendence, it
remains up to the person of Dasein to believe this and to allow them to have an
impact on his/her acts. This idea probably provides us with the key to the problem
of how to fit values into modalities and furthermore into signs – that is, how to
act. I offer you now such a proposal. No one can say, “I pursue such and such an
act because a transcendental value x requires me to do so”. When I select value
x as my ideal, it is always my own choice, for which I am responsible. This is my
main rebuttal to the argument most often used against value-realists. And that
argument is: What guarantees that a person will not adopt a completely foolish
transcendental value and even imagine himself to be right? When I have picked
value x, it falls into the field of the modalities and passions of our Dasein, amidst
our Wants, Obligations, Abilities, and Knowledge. Then I do the act, x or non-x;
that is, I either fulfil an act following this value or I give it up. I do something
against it, negating the value by my act (see Figure 1.4). Hence, the signified of
the act is the transcendental value, but only insofar as our subject has the proper
competence in the code whereby he/she can connect such an act to the transcend-
ental value in question.
Figure 1.4: The enactment of values
At the same time, this act triggers other acts, which either affirm or negate the act
x/non-x. Consequently, we can infer the crucial imperative for any moral activity:
If act /x → non-x/ causes in its Umwelt other negative acts, which are negative in
relation to other transcendental values, then such an act should not be commit-
ted. We might, for example, imagine that we have the transcendental value of hon-
1.6 Values | 13
esty or of keeping promises. However, somebody does something contrary (e.g.,

breaks a contract). This negative act, in its social environment, prompts reactions
or other acts that can likewise be negative: non-y punishing, non-p abandonment,
exclusion from the community, non-q hatred. All these reactive value-acts are, in
turn, negations of some transcendental values, such as indulgence, benevolence,
abstention from violence, charity, and so forth (see Figure 1.5).
Figure 1.5: Reaction to a value-act
In other words, if the correction of a negative value-act causes more negative acts
in its Umwelt than the original negative act did, then one has to give up such a
correction, give up being morally “right.”
As in any fulfilment of a value, two kinds of modalities function in such a
moral value-act: (1) modalities that regulate the acts and behaviors of their agents
in the Dasein, and (2) modalities that regulate the relationships of value-acts to
their transcendental values. This is a double movement: (a) It manifests and actu-
alizes values, by the process in which a virtual act changes and may even become
real. (b) We return to the value as it is in transcendence and compare the “actu-
alized” value to the virtual value. In this way, the transcendental value serves as
the source of the actualized value in Dasein. These two acts of meta-modalization
presuppose a particular value competency. If our subjects do not possess the right
codes by which to connect a potential, virtual value to an act that concretizes it,
and if they cannot decode from an act its value content and compare it to the
“encyclopaedia” of values, then the reality of values is not fulfilled at all.
This model should likewise fit with other values, such as truth or epistemic
values or beauty and aesthetic values. In any case, the subject of Dasein is
completely responsible for his value choices, that is to say, the values that he
metamodalizes from the (virtual) encyclopaedia of values. Naturally, when he
is devoid of some value because of, say, a lack of education, one may also
hold his community responsible; e.g., his “senders” in narratological terms

(school, parents, teachers). Still, he remains existentially responsible for which
transcendental values he selects, how he modalizes them into value acts, and the
kinds of value acts and modalities that they bring about.
The intermediate phase of modalities is indispensable in making values and
signs compatible. It also explains why some originally right value can, when trans-
formed into a value act, get distorted into a caricature of itself: It is caused by
modalization, in the transformation of the phase of actualization when the human
passions intervene. This explains the nature of metamodalities, mentioned above.
If they are altogether the activities of a subject, then how do metamodalities dis-
tinguish themselves from ordinary modalities? The answer is: They contribute to
the particular act of signification in which a value is connected to a physical act
or object of the sign vehicle. This implies the following kinds of modalities:
1. Want (vouloir): I want to connect value x to the signified of act x. Should the
subject not want it, this value could not manifest. A concern is whether such a
wanting or desire differs from that by which subjects of Dasein look after each
other or various value objects. Not even a psychoanalyst would presume that
Freudian desire can explain, for example, artistic activity, ethical choice, or
scientific research. Rather, a special form of human wanting is involved.
2. Know (savoir): I know that value x exists; without such knowledge I cannot
even want to concretize it in my value act. This kind of knowing is not that of
familiarity or acquaintance. Rather, it is more like the kind of knowledge we
receive in our Dasein, the kind of knowledge that information theory tries to
embody in its concepts of entropy and redundancy.
3. Can (pouvoir): I am able to (can) connect a value x to an act x. For example,
I want to help sick people, but to be capable of doing so I must master medi-
cine; I want to help the poor, but unless I am able give them something, I can-
not do it; I want to transmit artistic experiences, but if I do not master the
proper techniques, then I cannot produce any such emotions; and so forth.
4. Must (devoir): Denoting obligation or duty, must requires the internalization
of values such that we can experience the sense that a value obligates us to
act (or not) in a certain way. But even here, the metamodality of Must is our
own existential choice.
1.7 New types of signs
The traffic between these instances of signs – that is to say, between transcend-
ence and existence – is taken care of by metamodalities. Altogether, signs have
their situations, which is an aspect essential to the existential approach. If we
1.7 New types of signs | 15
take that traffic as a narrative structure portraying human life, it radically differs
from classical story schemes, which are symmetrical. Any narrative starts with a
situation in which we are hic, nunc, ego – Here, Now, Me – but then something hap-
pens that causes a “disengagement” from this primal state, to Elsewhere, Then,
Others. Yet, normally in a classical story, we return to the initial state; we are
“engaged” with it, hence the syntagmatic line becomes symmetrical. By contrast,
in existential semiosis there is no return – what happens next is always unknown
and unpredictable.
Another new scientific paradigm that has entered into existential semiotics –
perhaps paradoxically to some minds – is biosemiotics. Biosemiotics is one of
the new pursuits that have emerged in the last 20 years within general semiot-
ics, thanks to the writings of Thomas A. Sebeok (see, e.g., Sebeok 2001: 31–44),
and above all to the original doctrine advanced by the Estonian Jakob v. Uexküll
(Uexküll 1940). Biosemiotics does not argue that semiotic and symbolic processes
and forms are reducible to something biological, as do some sociobiological the-
ories that say society is ultimately nothing but biology. Rather, it is the other way
round: biology and vital processes are shown to be semioses. Jakob’s son, Thure
v. Uexküll, claims his father’s doctrine is particularly compatible with Peircean
semiotics (T. Uexküll et al. 1993), but nothing prevents us from using it in other
conceptual frameworks as well. To illustrate how such semiosis functions within
an organism, Uexküll uses musical metaphors; he says that every organism sur-
rounded by its Umwelt possesses its codes or something like a musical score,
which determines what signs it either accepts or rejects from the Umwelt. This
principle is called Ich-Ton, Me-Tone². Uexküll calls the process of signs intruding
into the organism and functioning therein endosemiosis. On this basis, we speak
of two kinds of signs: endo-signs and exo-signs, signs that are either inside or
outside the object (Tarasti 2000: 37–56).
I have tried to bring this idea back to music and art by arguing that every com-
poser, every composition, every artwork has a Me-Tone that determines its char-
acteristics. In this new framework of existential semiotics, and its fundamental
notions of Dasein and transcendence, we give it a Kantian interpretation, such
that the Ich-Ton appears through Kantian categories of subject (actor)-time-space,
whenever some transcendental idea is filtered into Dasein.
We can further distinguish as-if signs; these are signs that must not be taken
quite literally in the Dasein, but rather as kinds of metaphors. All signs of artistic
representation are of this nature; for example, many signs in cinema and theater
that should never be confused with reality. I also distinguish between pheno- and
2 On the Ich-Ton principle in music, see Tarasti 2002: 98, 109.

geno-signs³. Pheno-signs are traditional signs that refer to or stand for something
else. When referring to or standing for something, the sign remains what it is; it
is only a tool, a window into the world of the signified. By contrast, in the case
of geno-sign, the entire process of signs becoming signs is included: the whole
generation of the sign through various phases is vividly evoked by the appearance
of such a sign. For example, when we listen to the overture to Wagner’s Parsifal
we first hear a motif rising from the depths, solemn, sad, longing for something.
At this point it is a pheno-sign, which by its mere musical qualities evokes certain
modal content (Will, Can, etc.). A dedicated Wagnerian may recognize it as the
Abendmahl motif, referring to Amfortas. However, by the time it is heard six hours
later at the end of the opera, it has become a geno-sign. We feel that it contains the
entire life-story of Parsifal, who from a young and foolish fellow has grown into
the redeemer of the Grail knights. The motif carries the whole story within itself.
Here again we see an essential point: signs are never fixed; they are always in the
process of becoming something else.
Next I want to scrutinize some new issues and concepts whereby existential
semiotics tries to contribute to semiotics and to the humanities in general. These
will be discussed under the headings of Transcendence, Subject, Being, Doing,
and Appearing.
1.8 More on transcendence
Transcendence is not a concept that we are used to encountering in the semiotic

context. Dictionaries, encyclopaedias and handbooks from Greimas and Sebeok
as well as Posner, Nöth, and Bouissac simply exclude it from semiotic discus-
sion. Still, no one can deny its cogency and centrality to German philosophy from
Kant to Heidegger. As this philosophical tradition, its idealist nature rejected by
most semioticians, becomes to be seen more and more as nourishment to contem-
porary semiotics – witness the turn to phenomenology and hermeneutics in the
European context and to deconstruction in the USA – we can no longer ignore its
existence. In existential semiotics, the life of signs is situated in their movement
and traffic between transcendence and Dasein.
To some, the mere mention of a notion like transcendence has mystical or
theological overtones. If we go in this direction – which would also be very Heideg-
3 The terms pheno- and geno-text, as used here, have nothing to do with Julia Kristeva’s usage
of the same terms (Kristeva 1969), nor with Barthes’s “pheno-” and “geno-song” (Barthes 1977:
182).
1.8 More on transcendence | 17
gerian as far as he considered the ultimate goal of every being and Dasein to be
its disappearance, Sein zum Tod – we find that within existential semiotics we
can deal with even such profound and serious issues. In this framework, death
means the disappearance of the boundaries of the Dasein and the merging of a
subject with transcendence. The juxtaposition of the temporality of Dasein and
atemporality of transcendence – time/non-time – is reconciled. According to cer-
tain processes of narrativity and dynamism, everything that happened in Dasein
has accumulated into the acts of this subject. They are signs left by him that fuse
together with acts by other subjects who have already moved into transcendence.
This process is irreversible; no longer can the events therein be changed. They can
of course be re-narrativized, rendered part of the pseudo-narrativity and tempor-
ality of history writing. In such a case, a subject has the ability to “re-modalize”
them, and they are again subjected to communication processes. Transcendence,
however, represents pure signification without narrativization. Hence when the
boundaries of the Dasein become blurry or vanish altogether, then the real semi-
osis starts, without narrativity. There is narrativity only in Dasein. In turn, when
a transcendental idea intrudes into the Dasein of a subject, it becomes a sign and
it participates in communication.
One is led to ask what force makes a transcendental idea manifest in commu-
nication or incarnate into a sign. Signs have a certain imperishable part. Goethe
certainly referred to this when he said, Kein Wesen kann zu nichts zerfallen (no
being can disappear). Signs also have a perishable, temporal, spatial, and actorial
part. From the viewpoint of a subject, this involves the manifestation of content
in the physical appearance of the sign vehicle. Essential here is thus the concept
of a boundary: in order to become a sign, a transcendental idea must transgress
a limit.
Altogether, we can say that semiotics, in its deepest essence, is a transcend-
ental discipline. If it consists, following Umberto Eco, of two areas: communic-
ation and signification, one can easily notice how they both refer to something
transcendental. For the first, every communication act is a transcendental event
in which Mr. A tries to reach Mr. B with his message. Yet, Mr. B always remain a
‘transcendental’ entity to Mr. A, or what is called in philosophy ‘alien psychic’.
Assuming the phenomenological standpoint the only certain thing to Mr. A is his
own stream of consciousness. What happens in the mind of Mr. B is a hypothesis
that it is something similar to what happens in the mind of Mr. A. Therefore every
act of communication contains a true risk of misunderstanding.
On the other hand, as said, in every sign – in the Saussurean sense – the sig-
nified, the meaning looms behind the signifier, the sign vehicle and so the sense
or signification is as well something ‘transcendental’.
Figure 1.6: Communication according to de Saussure. In fact, it is a transcendental act

between two subjects
1.9 Mimesis
We might, then, refer to the incarnation of transcendence as a sign its “first

mimesis”, the latter as defined by Ricoeur (1983: 85–129). In other words, the
Dasein of a subject can mimic or simulate transcendence: man by his act(s)
wishes to change his Dasein according to some idea. Every action is founded on
the contradiction between an idea and the reality of Dasein. The subject wants to
intervene in the course of events. Existentially he can do so – that is to say, he is
free to do so, even if at the same time he might be incapable of it.
Ricoeur describes two more kinds of mimesis. When a subject in his Dasein
creates something that serves as a model of that Dasein (for example, “art im-
itating life”), then the second mimesis occurs. In Ricoeur’s theory, mimesis es-
sentially follows the course of communication: mimesis1 = production of sign,
and mimesis2 = the manner in which a sign simulates or portrays the living world
(Dasein). Mimesis3, then, would be the same as aesthesis, the reception or inter-
pretation of a sign.
In our model, however, mimesis does not take place horizontally, in a syn-
tagmatic or linear way as a kind of narrative course from sender to receiver, but
vertically as a movement from transcendence or a subject’s inner consciousness,
from a transcendental subject toward his living world, that is, Dasein (by tran-
scendental subject, we understand a subject who, by thought, tries to conceive of
transcendence). In this light, a slight correction is necessary to our earlier model
of transcendence. There are not two different transcendences, one an empty and
anguishing nothingness (le Néant), and the other a rich and overwhelming plen-
itude. There is only one transcendence, which the subject experiences as nothing-
ness in his act of negation, when he clings to his Dasein for fear of transgressing
the boundaries of his existence. This is caused by his unwillingness to give up the
merits, achievements, and signs he has won or otherwise obtained in the phases of
1.9 Mimesis | 19
his Dasein. In front of the unknown atemporal and anti-narrative transcendence,

he experiences anguish, and he feels that nothingness threatens the significations
he has made in his Dasein, which he believes to have created himself. Any and all
statements about the fact that his life has gone down the drain, that all his plans
have come to naught in the processes of Dasein – these all result from a metaphys-
ical attitude. Yet, when the boundaries of Dasein become blurred, the subject sees
the connection of his signs and acts to their proper, timeless transcendence and
real signification.
The subject has the liberty to pursue affirmation and negation, as stated
above. This means that he/she can reject the processes of mimesis1 through
mimesis3. When a subject opposes mimesis1, he does not want to listen to
the voice of the transcendental subject within himself and does not transform
transcendental ideas into signs. His existence does not reach the level of sign;
it remains a series of detached moments in the process of communication but
without real content. Models that remain within Dasein and emphasize its im-
manency, which claim that the only reality is Dasein itself, that the body and
society are a continuous process and that nothing else exists – such models are
based on the rejection of mimesis1.
A subject can also reject mimesis2, which is the idea that he can create in-
tentional objects in the course of Dasein. He may not realize that he can, by his
acts and signs (act-signs), imitate and simulate aspects of Dasein. An artist creates
copies and models his Dasein, in which, however, that artist can try to see the
existential in the narration of his/her own life. Music serves as such a narration
on a high level of abstraction.
In turn, mimesis3 may also be rejected. In this case, the subject rejects giving
up the positions and signs he has gained during processes of communication.
Yet, if he does not know to make the limits of his Dasein vis-à-vis transcendence
more transparent and thus experience the plenitude of transcendence – which is
nothing else but the encyclopaedia of acts and ideas in the totality of the tran-
scendent – he remains without this essential, decisive, and positive experience,
which can also change his attitude toward death and the vanishing of his Dasein.
In fact, in every temporal artwork such disappearance already takes place, but
still the subject seeks after such a mini-narration transfigured, because he has
mirrored the imperishable, transcendental entities of his life-world in the afore-
mentioned model and has become aware of them.
In any case, there is only one transcendence, but the individual who clings to
the communication processes of his Dasein, as rich as they may be, is blinded to its
contents, to the true semiosis of ideas and acts and significations, and hence be-
lieves transcendence to be empty. Therefore, only when he abandons the bound-
aries of his Dasein, or via some act of conception is able to step over this bor-
derline, does he realize the true plenitude of transcendence. This experience is

connected with the existential one: that he is already expected on the other side of
the boundary. All that is positive or negative, which he has left in his life, waits for
him in transcendence. Thus mimesis3 means transgressing the boundary, striving
and succeeding in getting beyond oneself.
The continuous crossing of limits of transcendence and Dasein constitutes
one of the most profound problems of existential semiotics. It manifests as many
sub-problems of the communication processes of Dasein. For example, it is not
enough for a subject to hear within himself the voice of a transcendental sub-
ject, which guides him to the right aesthetic resolution or ethical choice; he must
also manifest this voice to others in the world of communication; this involves
encountering a subject who is an alien-psychic entity. Such an encounter of the
alien-psychic is again essentially an event of mimesis2. That is to say, our subject
creates his model of “mini-Dasein” not to himself but in dialogue with someone
else, another, who influences it essentially. Our subject strives to anticipate such a
transcendence of the other – for example, to please him, to get his message under-
stood. But why is this so important? Why does our subject want to communicate?
Communication is always a crossing over the boundary, and in this sense it is a
model of both mimesis1 and mimesis2. The subject wants to show through com-
municating that his message goes beyond the boundary, that it is supported by the
authority of transcendence. But he also wants by this communicative act to aban-
don his own boundaries and taste in advance what the complete disappearance
of such borderlines would mean. Communication on this level of transference,
as shifts of values and modalities, means just such a fusion with the Other. It is
anticipating the final blending with the totally Other, that is, with transcendence
in the proper sense.
In fact, the forces of semiosis operate in two directions: vertically and ho-
rizontally. The vertical force leads to the fulfilment of ideas of transcendence,
to mimesis in Dasein, in such a manner that they first become noemata (ideas,
conceptions) of a subject. Thereafter the vertical movement continues within the
Dasein, modelling and simulating the latter in various texts and narratives. This
represents the second degree of mimesis. The third phase is in fact a kind of de-
mimesis, the return of ideas back to the transcendence with which they blend.
Narrativity is a special kind of syntagmatic form, which appears first in the
life-world of the Dasein and then in the world of text. In other words, the ideas are
at once modalized and syntagmatized so as to participate in processes of commu-
nication. This is the horizontal direction of semiosis, its temporalization.
Both the horizontal and the vertical forces are ultimately of a transcendental
nature. This is true of communication – every act of communication is an en-
counter with the Other, the alien psyche, a leap toward the unknown. And true of
signification – by signs we talk about things that are not present, that are already
transcendent. Therefore, the two essentials for a semiotics – communication and
signification – represent the transcendental for existential semiotics. When in
Saussure’s picture of a dialogue, Mr. A sends signs to Mr. B, the latter is a tran-
scendental entity to the former. There is a gap between them, but in human com-
munication the gap is not empty: it is filled by modalities and modalizations by
these subjects, both destinator and destinatee. The signs used and emitted here
are transcendental entities, because they are aliquid stat pro aliquo – something
standing for something, as goes the oldest Scholastic definition of sign.
1.10 The subject reconsidered: BEING
In the structuralist phase of semiotics, the subject was eliminated in favor of sys-
tems and grammars that were internalized in us, as Lacan postulated: Ça parle.
In poststructuralist and postmodern theories the subject re-entered. As noted at
the beginning of this chapter, one may interpret existential semiotics as one of
these new revalorizations of subjectivity in the history of ideas, but it is no longer a
“post-”phenomenon, but rather a part of “neosemiotics”. This paradigm sets forth
something radically new, borrowing what it needs from classical semiotics, and
combining these ideas with the most inspirational speculative philosophy from
Kant and Hegel to Sartre and Marcel. Neosemiotics never considers only the text
but all its conditions, its whole Umwelt, its process of becoming a text, the whole
act of enunciation. There has been much talk about subjects and subjectivity in
many neighboring areas of semiotics, such as psychoanalysis, gender theories,
and cultural theories.
Without a more articulated vision of how a subject appears in the enunciation
and in our semiotic activities in general, however, such theoretical efforts remain
short of their goals, as laudable as their efforts might be. To re-evaluate the subject
requires a short excursion to the roots of existential semiotics, which means go-
ing back to Hegel and his logic. For some semioticians, Hegel is mere conceptual
poetry, to others he becomes acceptable only after a Marxist turn-around, but to
some, like Hannah Arendt, he stands as the central thinker of Western philosophy.
He compiled phenomena of nature and history into a homogeneous construction;
it is hard to tell, however, whether that edifice is a prison or a palace (Arendt 2000:
111). To Arendt, Hegel was the last word in Western philosophy. All that came after
him either imitated him or rebelled against him. Present schools of thought – in
Arendt’s case, Husserl, Heidegger, and Jaspers – were epigones of Hegel; they all
tried to reconstruct the unity of thinking and being without reaching a balance at
which they either privileged matter (materialism) or mind (idealism).
Arendt might have been right. Even the semiotic thought is indebted to Hegel,
whose traces we can follow both in Peirce and Royce (discussed in separate
chapters, below) as well as in the French structuralists, the Tartu cultural semi-
oticians – and particularly in existential semiotics. Hence I take as my starting
point a principle from Hegelian logic, by which we construct further our theory of
subject – namely, his categories of an-sich-sein (Being-in-itself) and für-sich-sein
(Being-for-itself) (Inwood 1992: 133–136).
Hegel used the terms an sich and für sich in their ordinary senses but also
provided them with contrasting meanings. As finite, a thing has a determinate
nature only by virtue of its relation to other things: in negation of, and by, them.
This is true not only of items in the world but also of Kant’s thing-in-itself, since
it, too, is cut off from our cognition. Thus, a thing as it is an sich has no overtly
determinate character; at most, it has potential character that will be actualized
only by its relations to other things. An infant, for example, is an sich rational
potentially, not actually. A tailor is a tailor an sich in the sense of having certain
internal skills that suit him for this role and of having certain overt features that
distinguish him from, say, a sailor. Being a tailor, or musician, thus involves an
interplay between being an sich and being for another. But a person is not simply
a role occupant. He is also an individual “I” and as such can distance himself from
his role and think of himself just as me or I.When he does this, he is no longer
for others but for himself. For example, a bus driver has already left a stop, but
notices one person still running to catch the bus. Against the rules, he stops and
takes on the passenger because he feels compassion for him. Although his self-
consciousness may presuppose recognition by others, an “I” is not one of a system
of contrasting roles: Everyone is an I.
The idea that if something is for itself, if it is aware of itself, leads to the idea
that an entity may have in itself certain characteristics that are not for itself. A slave
is, as a man, free in himself, but he may not be free for himself. The student may
be a future doctor and professor, but he does not yet know it. Finally, the terms
an sich and für sich, as signifying potentiality and actuality, may be applied to a
subject’s development. When a person becomes for himself what he is in himself,
he usually recognizes his identity: he becomes meaningful to himself. But before
we make an existential-semiotic turn-around of Hegel, let us see what Kierkegaard
did with the notions of an sich and für sich.
In his thought, these notions turn into subjective and objective being. In
the chapter, “Becoming a Subject” in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript,
Kierkegaard speaks about an individual who is said to be a subject, an individual
who is what he is simply because he has become that (Kierkegaard 1993 [1846]).
The transformation of a subject from an sich being to für sich being corresponds to
his becoming a sign to himself, or the emergence of his identity. Kierkegaard says
the task of the subject is to shed more and more of his subjectivity and become
more and more objective. The objective being is the same when observing as when
being observed. But in his theory, this observation has to be of an ethical nature.
The next careful reader of Hegel (and of Kierkegaard) was Jean-Paul Sartre,
whose L’Être et le néant (1943) was, to a great extent, based on the Hegelian con-
cepts of an sich and für sich (être-en-soi and être-pour-soi). According to Sartre,
Being simply is and cannot help but be. But Being has as its potentiality the fact
that it becomes aware of itself via an act of negation. In Kierkegaardian terms,
the being becomes an observer of itself, and hence is shifted into Being-for-itself.
This is precisely transcending. The pour-soi as the outburst of negation forms the
basis for identity. It appears as a lack. According to Sartre, this is the beginning of
transcendence. As said above of narrativity: human reality strives for something
that it lacks (Sartre 1943: 124–125). Man starts to exist when he realizes the in-
completeness of its being. Via this effort, value enters human life. Value is that to
which one aspires. Being-in-itself precedes every consciousness; Being-in-itself
is the same as what Being-for-itself was earlier. The essential change in Sartre’s
theory regarding Hegel is the movement between these two categories, and a kind
of subjectivization of them in view of existence.
Another modernization of Hegel and his categories has been offered by
Jacques Fontanille in his study Soma et séma: Figures du corps (Fontanille 2004).
In the book he deals with corporeal semiotics and presents the distinction
between categories of Moi and Soi in a fresh manner. As a Greimassian semioti-
cian, Fontanille starts from the actant and his/her body. He distinguishes between
body and form. We speak of body as such or flesh (chair), which is the center of
everything, as the material resistance to or impulse toward semiotic processes.
The body is the sensorial motor fulcrum of semiotic experience (ibid.: 22). On the
other hand, there is another body, which constitutes the identity and directional
principle of the flesh. This body is the carrier of the “me” (Moi), whereas the literal
body supports the “self” (Soi) (ibid.: 22–23). The Soi constructs itself in discursive
activity. The Soi is that part of ourselves which the me, Moi, extends beyond itself
so as to create itself in its activity. The Moi is that part of ourselves to which the
Soi refers when establishing itself. The Moi provides the Soi with impulse and
resistance whereby it can become something. In turn, the Soi furnishes the Moi
with the reflexivity that it needs to stay within its limits when it changes. The Moi
resists and forces the Soi to meet its own alterity. Hence the two are inseparable.
Although Fontanille is a semiotician, his reasoning fits well with the afore-
mentioned Hegelian categories. This involves a new interpretation of an sich and
für sich, the first corresponding to bodily ego and the latter to its stability, identity,
and aspiration outward (Sartrean negation). The Soi functions as a kind of mem-
ory of the body, or Moi; it gives form to those traces of tensions and needs that
have place in the flesh of the Moi.
In the light of Fontanille’s concepts, we could change the Hegelian Being-in-
itself and Being-for-itself (an-sich-sein and für-sich-sein) to an-mir-sein and für-
mich-sein – Being-in-myself and Being-for-myself. Before we ponder the con-
sequences this may have for our existential semiotics, we shall first examine the
principles of Moi and Soi as such. Anything belonging to the category of mich, me,
concerns the subject as an individual entity; whereas the concept of sich has to be
reserved for the social aspect of this subject. In terms of Uexküll’s principle of
Ich-Ton, which determines the identity and individuality of an organism, we can
distinguish in it two aspects: Moi and Soi. In “me” the subject appears as such, as
a bundle of sensations; in the “self” the subject appears as observed by others,
as socially determined. These constitute the existential and social aspects of the
subject, or rather, its individual and communal sides.
Here we put together most important ideas presented above. My intention was
to specify the category of Being by providing this basic modality with new aspects
drawn from Kant and Hegel, and to follow the phases of this concept further,
from Kierkegaard to Sartre and Fontanille. When one aims for more subtle tools
in semiotics, one can still find basic innovations in classics of the philosophy.
Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself were turned into Being-in-and-for-myself in ex-
istential semiotics. When these notions are combined in the Greimassian semiotic
square, one gets the cases shown in Figure 1.7.
Figure 1.7: Moi/Soi

The figure may be interpreted as follows:

1. Being-in-myself represents our bodily ego, which appears as kinetic energy,
“khora”, desire, gestures, intonations, Peirce’s Firstness. Our ego is not yet
conscious of itself in any way, but rests in the naïve Firstness of its Being.
Modality: endotactic Will.
2. Being-for-myself corresponds to Kierkegaard’s attitude of an “observer”. It is
Sartre’s negation, in which the mere being shifts to transcendence, notes the
lack in its own existence, and thus becomes aware of itself and transcend-
ence. The mere being of the subject becomes existing. This corresponds to the
transcendental acts of my previous model: negation and affirmation. The ego
discovers its identity, reaches a certain stability, a permanent corporeality via
habit. Modality: endotactic Can.
3. Being-in-itself is a transcendental category. It refers to norms, ideas, and val-
ues, which are purely conceptual and virtual; they are the potentialities of
a subject, which he can either actualize or not actualize. Abstract units and
categories are involved. Modality: exotactic, Must.
4. Being-for-itself means the aforementioned norms, ideas, and values as real-
ized by the conduct of our subject in his Dasein. Those abstract entities appear
here as distinctions, applied values, choices, and realizations that often will
be far away from original transcendental entities. Modality: exotactic, Know.
The essential aspect of the model is that it combines the spheres of Moi and Soi,
the individual and collective subjectivities. It portrays semiosis not only as a move-
ment of the collective Hegelian spirit, but also Being-in-and-for-itself – the pres-
ence of a subject – via Being-in-and-for-myself. Not only is the distinction of these
four logical cases crucial, but so is the movement among them, which is the trans-
formation of a chaotic corporeal ego into its identity, the transforming of ego into
a sign to itself. We must further take into account the impact of such a stable and
completely responsible “transcendental” ego on the actualization of transcend-
ental values, in which the ego becomes a sign to other subjects. In this phase,
the Being-in-and-for-myself meets the You, or Being-in-and-for-yourself, Others.
Behind a thus-created social field looms the realm of transcendental and virtual
values and norms, signs that have not yet become signs to anyone. Hence our
model portrays the varieties of our individual and social being within the mind of
a subject. It shows how the social intrudes into our innermost being and makes us
social “animals”. In the classical sense, the semiotic sphere consists only of fields
of Being-for-myself and Being-for-itself. The extremities of the semiotic square are
the field of pre-signs, which surround from two sides the semiosis in the proper
sense. In this semiosis, however, the process of act-signs cannot be understood
without going outside of it, to transcendence. The existential analysis hence be-
comes a Kantian transcendental analytics in these two phases.
We can elaborate this a-chronic structure further. Strictly speaking, it is no
longer a Greimassian semiotic square with its rigorous logical relations of con-
trariety, contradiction, and implication. In what follows, I move even further from
the idea of a static square, toward a more dynamic and flexible model in which
everything is in motion – a fundamental thesis of existential semiotics since its
beginning.
We can now improve the model and make it still simpler by indicating those
four cases of Being on the semiotic square, using the following signs: M1, M2, M3,
M4; and S1, S2, S3, S4:
Figure 1.8: Moi and Soi on the semiotic square
When these cases overlap, they appear as in Figure 1.8. They are almost the same
as above but are now seen from the standpoint of our semiotic subject in general
and not as his acts embodied in texts or signs. There are two directions in the
model. One starts from pure corporeality and sensibility (M1; le sensible), moves
to a permanent, stable body (M2), and further to the social representation of the
body in social roles and professions (M3), and finally to abstract values and norms
of a society (M4; l’intelligible, l’abstrait). Conversely, there is a movement from
abstract norms to their exemplifications or representations in certain social insti-
tutions, further to their enactment via the suitable personalities that these insti-
tutes recruit for their purposes, and ultimately to certain corporeal entities. Hence
in every form of the square, at the upper side of the Moi (as we call that part
of the “me” in the model), there is a tiny trace of the social; correspondingly, in
even the most abstract social norms, there is a tiny trace of pure corporeality. The
model itself takes place within the mind of a subject, explaining how the social is
internalized in it, and thus why we behave socially (i.e., obeying laws and norms).
Figure 1.9: Moi and soi, overlapping
It explains how society keeps us in its grasp. In Adorno’s terms, it is the juxtapos-
ition of Ich und Gesellschaft. As a Greimassian semiotic square, I have in previous
studies made efforts to temporalize it by viewing movements among its members.
Now I would rather call it the “zemic” or Z-model, in view of its inner (emic)
motions.
The model seems apt for describing almost any possible theory or approach to
human reality, depending on which aspect of subjectivity – psychological, indi-
vidual, or collective – it emphasizes. For example, L’esprit des lois by Montesquieu
(S1); Culture in Minds and Societies by Jaan Valsiner (2007; all M cases in the light
of the S’s); Philosophy of Flesh by Mark Johnson (M1); Dictionnaire du corps (CNRS
Editions 2008; all varieties of M); Characters by La Bruyère (M2); Goethe’s Wil-
helm Meisters Lehrjahre, as well as the Bildungsroman in general, in its shift from
M1 to S1. We can also situate other central concepts of existential semiotics into
these positions: dialogue, representation, and so forth. I leave transcendence out
at this point, because the model is still completely immanent – that is, it deals
with phenomena of our empirical or phenomenal world, that is to say, Dasein.
Transcendence becomes a crucial addendum later.
The model calls for further elaboration. As it stands, it concerns four stable
moments of Being. But what if we consider the modality of Doing? In that case,
do the four movements represent a kind of “organic” growth from pure body to
social norms? If yes, does this development take place by itself or by acts and
activities of our subject? Is he/she able to promote or resist it – that is, affirm
or deny it? As Schelling put it: either we are only looking at and observing this
process (i.e., we are in a state of Schauen), or we can influence or cause it (i.e.,
we act via Handeln). How does the dialogue take place as an autocommunication
among those instances of subject? Which signs and texts represent each moment?
And what kinds of questions does our subject encounter in each stage?
1.11 Questions by a subject: From BEING to DOING
In the foregoing scheme, man poses questions; in the cases of M, these questions
are individual, whereas in cases of S they are collective. This is very typical of
existential semiotics, which always tries to imagine and portray the life of signs
from within – how it “feels” to be in the position of S1 or S2, and so forth.
(1) In the case of M1, we might ask, Who am I in my body, perceived in its
chaotic and fleshly Firstness? Answers being, for example, “I wake up in the morn-
ing, I breathe, I feel no pain, I exist, this is wonderful”. Avicenna imagined a man
floating in the air without any external stimuli, yet still being sure of his existence;
this would equal the state of M1. Yet, even his primary being has been soon mod-
alized, with euphoric or dysphoric “thymic” values as follows: which properties
I have, what I am capable of, what I am good at – that is, what is involved is
my sensibility, my Sinnlichkeit. In Lévi-Strauss’s terms, this is the “concrete”, le
sensible, the case of being in archaic societies, such as the Suyá Indians in Mato
Grosso. These have a corporeal existence, but are in direct touch with myths –
beliefs in the case of S1 (see Anthony Seeger 2004).
(2) How can I develop my capacities so that I become a personality, so that
I assume an identity? This is Snellman’s (1806–1881) notion of personality, the
Goethean schöner Geist. By what training can I sublimate my physical essence
into a man/woman with a certain competence?
(3) How can I obtain a job, position, role in a social institute that would suit
my personality, skills, and inclinations? How can I become this or that business-
man, artist, politician, administrator, teacher, professor, officer, priest, and so
forth? How do I obtain work that is equal to my capacities? How can I act in the
community so that I become accepted by it and gain appreciation and success?
(4) Can I accept the dominant values and norms of my community and so-
ciety? If yes, then how can I, on this level of “Fourthness”, bring them to their
brilliance and efficiency? If no (since we can always either affirm or deny), then
how can I become a dissident, up to extreme negation and refusal? How can I
withdraw from values that I find unacceptable and become an extreme pacifist,
ecologist, and so forth?
We are dealing here with quite concrete cases and positions of our subject, not
only with theoretical ontological varieties of different kinds of “being”. From the
standpoint of the society, however, its members, individual Mois, are but carriers
or vehicles of the Soi, its tools and implementations. Hence we may from the point
of view of Soi ask the following collective questions of Moi:
(1) How does the latter instantiate the voice of the society, its ideology and
axiology, which appear in sanctified texts and myths? That is, how does Moi rep-
resent the society as a virtual belief system?
(2) Here, norms and principles are shifted into manifest laws, rules, and in-
stitutions. How are the activities of individual members of the society regulated,
dominated, and ruled by norms and social practices? How are such laws and rules
channelled into acceptable forms and genres of behavior? This is the same as
Bourdieu’s notion of habitus.
(3) To what extent can individual personal properties and characteristics
serve the society? Which types of persons are the proper material for its institu-
tions? How are persons recruited into these practices? Interviews in job-hunting,
for example.
(4) How does the society penetrate even to the physical-sensible behavior
of an individual? How are gender distinctions partly constructed? Here, we en-
counter those modalities whereby a Soi enacts its commitments and those pas-
sions that make it real in the innermost core of the individual, by emotions and
feelings of guilt, shame, glory, duty, and their quasi-physical counterparts of be-
havior.
Involved here is the realization of Moi and Soi via four phases in two op-
posed directions, in the Dasein. Issue here is linked to this movement and its
goal-directness, Kantian Zweckmässigkeit (1790 [1974]: 322–325), hence this con-
stitutes the Schellingian action, Handeln. Yet each phase also has its existential
side. That is, each phase can stop, can cease moving automatically or organic-
ally forward by stepping into transcendence, by reflecting on each developmental
stage from the viewpoint of its essence – that “idea” or “value” which tells us how
things should be. We know, however, that from being itself we cannot infer in any
way how it should be.
1.11.1 Consequences of our varieties of subjectivity
Let us advance these consequences in the form of 17 theses:

(1) Every sign or text stems from its being or from a certain being behind
it: ontological foundation. Hence, the basis of this theory lies in the modality of
Being, the philosophical category of Sein. In this sense, the theory proposed here
is “realist” and not nominalist. The latter would mean taking into account only
what is in the discourse, the textual level; whereas here we postulate an agent,
a subject from whom these texts and signs originate. This means that we can
somehow scrutinize every species and form of sign in this framework, and can in
this context also interpret every scientific theory and discourse about human life.
(2) Each sign or text is made by a subject in a given state of being, or
emerges “organically” from it. This is one of the fundamental issues of any
semiotic theory: whether signs are just pragmatic, changeable, and variable tools
that are continuously analyzed and improved upon by the agents using them,
or whether they exist objectively and independent of the choices and acts of a
semiotic subject.
(3) One mode of being changes into another. Hence, the shift from M1 to
M4 can also be interpreted as the psychological development of a subject from
childhood to adult. As such, it represents a subject’s generative course. We should
note that no achieved stage disappears from one’s life when he or she reaches a
new state; rather, one is constructed as a multilevel psyche in the course of life.
Even in the body, M1 changes physically as it ages; for example, persons, old and
young, may become anguished at noticing these changes, and as a result must re-
modalize him/herself (Darrault-Harris and Klein 2007). On the other hand, within
a subjective microtime, such as a day, one must dedicate a part of it to corporeal
existence; i.e., to M1: eat, sleep, etc. Another part goes to personal hobbies in
M2, another part for salaried work in M3. And a part may be devoted to general
interests, to public life, social associations for universal values; i.e., to M4 = S1.
Bertrand Russell recommended that with age the last part should become more
and more prominent, when M3 action is completed with retirement. This is valid
in much of Western society, of course; but in archaic communities the division
of daily routine is different, as it is in postmodern, post-industrial society. One
who is unemployed may be deprived of levels M3 and M4, but can focus on his M1
and M2. Different profiles of lifestyles, can thus be sketched on the basis of our
Z-model.
(4) Different modes of being are in dialogue with each other. So far exist-
ential semiotics has mostly dealt with only a single, solipsistic subject, living its
life in his/her Dasein and pursuing his/her “transcendental journeys”. Yet, a sub-
ject is formed and constituted by his/her communication with other subjects as
much as by personal choices. John Dewey said that mere communication as such
is educative. Some scholars have even argued that such a dialogue is the primary
issue; in other words, communication and mediation – all our ideas, concepts,
and values – are nothing but absolutizations of these experiences of dialogue.
The best-known theory in this regard is that by Mikhail Bakhtin. An entire school
of psychology has been elaborated on his theory by Hubert J. M. Hermans, who
speaks about the dialogical self as a “society of mind”. To Hermans, this notion
was inspired by William James in his classic distinction of “I” and “Me” (as also
with George Herbert Mead) and by Bakhtin in his theory of the polyphonic novel.
Thus for Hermans “Self and society both function as a polyphony of consonant
and dissonant voices” (Hermans 2002: 148).
The issue here is whether we consider the dialogue as a disturbing element
(“noise”) in our Z-model, which seems to be a relatively closed and autotelic pro-
cess. Or do we take dialogue as the precondition of any such process and shift
from one phase to the other? If we take the phenomenological position, then the
only certain thing is our own stream of consciousness; anything that happens in
another’s mind is only our hypothesis, and it is a constant source of frustration
in our lives when these others do not behave as we expected. Dialogue always
constitutes the unpredictable element in our Dasein; it serves as the Freudian real-
ity principle, correcting our otherwise random and sometimes wild fantasies and
concepts. The other external issue that provides us with standards and suasive
forces is transcendence.
(5) What does it mean that one mode of being changes into another?
This is the principle of “unfolding” development, of history both in individuals
and societies. There are two major narratives of such metamorphoses, one stem-
ming from M1 and moving toward S1, the other from S1 and ultimately reaching
M1. The Finnish psychiatrist and writer Oscar Parland wrote a novel, Förvand-
lingar (Changes), in which he, with astonishment, scrutinized transformations of
human life, such that new identities could emerge under the cover of a gastropod
shell and a brilliant butterfly emerge (Parland 1945 [1966]). Or, as in Turgenev’s
novels, a person is portrayed in heartbreaking and incurable sorrow at one mo-
ment, and in the next moment appears years later, talking and laughing cheerfully
with others.
(6) Every mode of being has its history: the memory of what it was, and
the expectations of what it will be. This means that the paradigms of memory
and expectation are open at each moment of the process of the horizontal appear-
ance, but in the existential sense we are not bound to them. In his speech at the
La Coruña world congress of the International Association for Semiotic Studies,
Salman Rushdie asked whether or not we are bound to our history. Expectation
is in turn based on the modality of “believe” (Greimas) or the principle of hope
(Ernst Bloch 1985). These in turn are closely related to the modality of “knowing”.
Some would say that hope is based on ignorance, the fact that we probably do not
know what will happen. Life is a determined semiosis in many respects; however,
there is that improbabilité infinie, which can happen, which in fact really does
happen, and which causes huge empires to collapse. A person can achieve some-
thing against all odds and evaluations (Arendt 1972: 221). If all signs obtain their
power in reference to the past by the functioning of involuntary memory (Henri
Bergson), they also can be re-articulated, first by reflection and thought in our
present, and then in our textual and discursive activities, whereby these intuitions
are communicated to others. Hence what was at first totally private, unique, and
mental, becomes public, common, and ultimately a semiotic force in reshaping
our Dasein.
(7) Every sign is considered an appearance with regard to its Being;
thus, Being constitutes its truth. Does the Z-model, then, describe the essence
of the world, understood as what and how life really is in our Dasein, as a kind
of ontological depth that then manifests as our semiotic-symbolic activities? The
whole theory of Schein is extremely important here, where we speak of “vertical
appearance”. To say that truth is always conditioned by history would mean to
deny this type of Schein. In the words of Kant: “. . . so kann man nicht vermeiden,
dass nicht alles dadurch in blossen Schein verwandelt werde” (1787 [1968]: 116).
(8) Dialogue between two subjects, or how modes take place in different
“levels” or modes. Who speaks in a dialogue? A subject who consists of various
portions or degrees of the principles M and S. Dialogue is a mutual transference
that is aided or blocked by similarity, identity, or difference between the Moi and
Soi. A dialogue exists (a) when within the same Dasein Moi A and Moi B, share the
same Soi; or (b) when they share the same S and M; e.g., M = gender and S = values,
and these two actors, x and y, in communication both have their own variants of
M1, M2, M3 . . . and S1, S2, S3 . . . . In the case of (a), the Italian scholars Gino Stefani
and Stefania Guerra Lisi, in their pathbreaking treatise on art therapy, Globality of
Languages in Art and in Life (2006), elaborate the principle of contact in all com-
munication. How we get in contact with other persons is certainly a fundamental
issue in our Dasein, and negatively so if a lecturer or performer feels he did not
gain contact with his audience, or a teacher with his pupils.
Now the following questions arise: (1) How does the dialogue intervene in
and influence our becoming and growth from M1 to S1? (2) How does the dialogue
intervene in our transformation from the social man into an individual who has a
unique destiny in the world, and who distinguishes him-/herself not only socially
(Bourdieu) but also existentially? In the first case, our subject-actor externalizes
him-/herself, becomes manifest; he/she explains himself by getting involved in
broader and broader circles and contexts. In the latter case, it is the society, S, that
understands itself by becoming more and more substantial and concrete. How
does the subject in its state of M1 reach toward S1 in its efforts to succeed in social
life, and in its desire to become accepted? On the other hand, how is M1 manipu-
lated by S1 and S2 via its formation process, Bildung, Erscheinen, development?
Communication is a special type of appearance, Erscheinen. We have there,
in an ideal case, two subjects, X and Y (Saussure’s Mr. A and Mr. B) in a dialogue.
X sends a sign from his/her M1 and Y answers from the position of his/her M2. For
example, a young artist or student, full of enthusiasm but without techniques,
displays something he has written chaotically by his intuition, and the receiver
answers from his/her S3: Do not try, you should first work and learn a lot! But the
answer can also derive from the receiver’s S2: You must first be a professionally
recognized artist. Or from S1: Your expression has no aesthetic value whatsoever!
Contact is not established unless the subjects talk on the same levels of their M/S
modes. This is one source of misunderstanding among individuals and collective
actors. In society, we listen to the signs of S. If signs of M and S come into con-
flict, how do we judge? The situation is analogous to Husserl’s distinction of two
types of sign: Bedeutungszeichen and Ausdruckszeichen – that is, symbolic, con-
ventional exo-signs as signs of S, and expressive endo-signs, often iconic, organic
signs of M. The third type of sign is transcendental, leading us beyond both Moi
and Soi. By transcendental signs we reflect on those of M/S. They form a kind of
metalanguage whereby we talk about our situation in Dasein and transcend it.
(9) The real semiotic forces in the universe occur in the two opposite
directions: from body to values, that is, from concrete to abstract (M1–S1),
or from values and norms to “khora” (S1–M1). The essential issue leading us
toward semiotics of action, toward what Habermas called “kommunikatives Han-
deln” (Habermas 1987), is whether we can trust that these forces function organic-
ally, and watch only to see if something goes wrong so as to correct the Z process,
or if we are we required to do something, perform a special semiotic act, with
every shift from M1 to M2 to M3 = S2, and so forth. If yes, then what is the nature of
such an act whereby we intervene in the course of the events? Should it be studied
according to a logic of action, as in considering how p becomes q? Or should we
adopt the Heideggerian principle of Gelassenheit, the principle of letting things
happen, as put forth by Morris (1956)?
(10) The encounter between Moi and Soi – i.e., body and society – takes
place between M2 and S2. Hence the essential shift is from social practices to
individual or already half-socialized identities and personalities. Yet this “bridge”
from M to S or from S to M cannot be separated from the encounter as a whole.
We might say that there are two concepts that crystallize this encounter. One is
“gesture”, which characterizes the cases M1 and M2. In M1 “gesture” is still only
on the level of behavior. Yet gesture can become intentional in M2 when it is done
by a person with an identity, and then we reach the phase of “acting” or Handeln.
The other important notion here is the one of “genre”, or Gattung, as a special type
of social practice both in action and text. All genre scholars admit that it is essen-
tially a social notion, based on a collective agreement, and that it presupposes a
proper audience, a receiver community. For example, TV, cinema, and mass media
genres have been formed for special types of public, as Cobley has emphasized
(2001: 192). In literature it is constituted by readers; in music it is constituted by
listeners. Therefore, the encounter of Me and Society, Moi and Soi, takes place
as the conjunction, either blending together or conflicting, between gesture and
genre. As Adorno has said, gestures that cannot be developed, only repeated and
intensified (Adorno 1974: 32). They must be put into expressive genres in order to
be influential in the cultural sense, and not remain on merely the psychological,
individual level. Sometimes the “me” wants to impose its own new Soi; as regard-
ing avant-garde works of art, it is said that they create their own audience. This
can prove difficult, however, because communication is possible only by means of

an accepted language, grammar as a social agreement and construction. A single
Moi cannot decide this, unless he/she wants to speak an idiolectic language un-
derstood by only one person. On the other hand, genres need to be attractive to
individuals, to M2s, so as to serve their purposes. In this sense, genre involves
making an impact (Wirken) according to a certain plan, or semiotically speaking,
narrative program.
Using Brémond’s (1973) terms, we can describe the narrative phases leading
our subject (internally) from one mode or phase to the others: the shift from S1 to
S2 = virtuality; from S2 to S3 (M2) = passage to an act; and from S3 (M2) to S4 (M1).
We may ask, How does this relate to the demand of existentiality? Is existentiality
present in phases M1 and M2, thereafter giving place for something “social”, the
Soi, which would then be the origin of semiosis? If so, then a semiotic act would
be essentially of a social nature, and we would from those phenomenological
adventures return to the Saussurean basis. However, if we conceive the semiotic
act existentially as a transcendental act, we would rather think that our subject
was able to take some distance from all those four modes of being, and from the
operations connecting them and putting them into a developmental scheme from
M1 to S1 or vice versa, so to step outside of this process, in which case the real leap
is based precisely on the liberty of the subject to scrutinize his/her Dasein from a
transcendental viewpoint and thus pursue what we earlier called a “transcend-
ental journey”.
(11) In the analysis of subjects (of Being and Doing) and their represent-
ations (appearing), the four modes can exist simultaneously. Valsiner (2007)
quotes Lewin’s comparison between American and German personality spheres
and how easily their borderlines can be crossed. The structure of intrapsycholo-
gical borderline systems is involved here. Layer 5 is the utmost subjective, deeply
intrapersonal level. In the American U-type personality, this layer is protected by
resistance boundaries to outsiders’ penetration, whereas the other layers (1–4)
can be crossed in the interpersonal domain with relative ease. In the German
G-type only, the outermost layer is easily crossed; in other layers one is more pro-
tected (Figure 1.10).
Valsiner has concluded that people create their own personal-cultural struc-
ture of self-boundaries and rules for entry into the various layers of one’s self
(ibid.: 247). We could say the same about crossing the boundaries from M1 through
S1 (Figure 1.11).
The boundaries between the modes are not necessarily fixed, but vary accord-
ing to different situations of dialogue with other persons in the community. Signs
are used to mark these spheres; for example, clothes, such as uniforms, can sig-
nify the protection of M1 and M2 in the social role of a priest, soldier, businessmen.
Figure 1.10: Kurt Lewin’s comparison of social relations in (a) America and (b) Germany
(Valsiner 2007: 247)
Figure 1.11: Boundaries of the self, according to Valsiner (2007)
On an airplane, passengers quickly mark their spheres by placing things around

themselves. Though one person lets another intrude into his/her M2 or even M1,
this may not hold true with a different person. Marshal Mannerheim could toast
with a young solder at an evening party, but the next day found him again in his
high position.
The dialogical-self model questions the idea of a fixed core, if one assumes
that, as Hermans defines it, “The dialogical self is conceived as social – not in the
sense that a self-contained individual enters into social interactions with other
outside people, but in the sense that other people occupy positions in the mul-
tivoiced self. The self is not only ‘here’ but also ‘there’, and because of the power of
imagination the person can act as if he or she were the other” (Valsiner 2007: 149).”
This was evident as early as in the early works of Bakhtin, when he discovered
the dialogical nature of any communication. This dialogical principle is organized
into an imaginary landscape in which “I” has the possibility to move as in space,
which is exactly what Proust said about music and its capacity to teach people to
see unknown realities through others’ eyes.
(12) Among the modes, there exists a process of learning (“knowing”)
from a subject’s inner point of view or of educating (“making known”).
Learning and teaching are essentially dialogue, but the problem for every indi-
vidual M1 is to become M2 and M3, and so forth, whereas from the viewpoint of
culture, it is crucial that its values of S1 are adopted, assimilated, maintained, and
renewed by institutions, personalities, and ultimately living and experiencing
human subjects. So, for example, if S1 = love for fatherland (Heimat), then S2
may = army, S3 = M2 = soldier, and then S4 = M1 = a certain combination of
qualities. Another example: S1 = love for beauty in communication; S2 = theater,
M2 = actor, M1 = certain physiopsychic qualities; or S1 = love for beauty in sounds;
S2 = orchestra, S3 = M2 = musician, M1 = certain ability to hear and body to play.
Whether teaching occurs as a dialogue between a master with high competence
and a younger pupil imitating him/her, or as a self-teaching process in a dialogical
group or club is an interesting educational issue. On one hand, culture decides
which texts and modalities are to be preserved and further transmitted to younger
generations and which are to be forgotten. Ultimately, the distinction between
“culture” and “civilization” (see Elias 1997) concerns putting the emphasis either
on S1 – as internal, interoceptive – or on M1, as exteroceptive, sensuality, pleasure.
(13) Every mode of Being and Doing as well as Becoming has its own
ambiance, atmosphere, Stimmung, how they feel in their positions. Such an
emotional atmosphere emerges from the isotopies, which are the basis of any
action or decision-making. The existential project emphasizes this inner view of
things.
(14) At every stage or mode, possibilities are open for reflection (Schau-
en), dissociation, alienation, and existentiality, which means a shift to a
metalevel, “meta-being” via affirmation/negation. Hence, the possibility
of freedom opens on the side of necessity. Here, we have to ponder how the
transcendence appears and manifests in the Dasein; often, it occurs as a noise or
disturbance in the communication. Let us think of such a value as goodness. How
can we explain that such things as goodness are a reality? Those who do good
acts most often have to suffer and even become martyrs from their consequences,
not merely in the sense of ingratitude from the side of the objects of goodness,
but even their hostility. Arendt said that good acts have to be concealed; they
can never be made public. That, however, cannot always be avoided. How can
goodness make people worse and not better? Because goodness means strength,
and by helping others, one shows he/she is stronger than the other, a form of
subordination that people consider unbearable. On the other hand, goodness
makes evil appear, and when it is foregrounded, it can be more easily attacked
and conquered. Goodness may thus seem an anomaly and disturbance. Very often
transcendence is felt in such a way.
(15) One mode of Being can compensate or sublimate another. In the
process of civilization, certain basic qualities are, via training and education, el-
evated from their merely physical qualities to the most spiritual, Thirdness-level
phenomena and sign actions. Yet there are limits: the lack of certain M1 proper-
ties cannot be compensated for by a strong belief in certain values and cultural
goals. A young person may hear in an entrance examination: “You will never be-
come this and that”. Prophecies often realize themselves but also cause counter-
reactions that make an individual cross over his normal boundaries.
(16) Each mode of Being is an actuality, but in a dialogue with others
it becomes reality; yet, these modes originate from and aim for virtualit-
ies. Virtuality here is the same as transcendence, hence the problem is, How do
we communicate with such an entity as transcendence? Is transcendental move-
ment opposed to a dialogue in Dasein? Dialogue can strengthen or weaken the
development of Moi. In fact, Moi is constituted by and in dialogue only, but how
can we be sure that there is a transcendental dimension to our whole existence?
What we consider the voice of transcendence may be nothing but the impact of
another subject on us, and via him/her the S1 what our surrounding community
takes as transcendental: it is true and absolute under all circumstances. What is
the difference and how do we distinguish between truth in Dasein and truth in a
transcendental sense? How do we talk with transcendence? Via meta-modalities?
If I want something in Dasein, how does that differ from wanting and striving for
something transcendental? Does the latter mean an elevation of something into
a general and universal principle for all others as well? Or if I know something in
Dasein, how do I know in transcendence? The latter may seem irrational or absurd
in the light of the former.
(17) Every mode of being has one dominant modality that organizes
and subordinates the others. Thus, in M1 the modality of Will is the most im-
portant; everything is in a state of wanting/willing to be actualized. In M2, Can
organizes all the other modalities, which find their place in harmony or dishar-
mony with that modality; involved here is what one realistically Can do with one’s
modalities, their capacity to be actualized. In M3, Know gives further possibilities
for enacting, actualizing, realizing modalities; the knowledge (Wissen) accumu-
lated in social institutions provides persons with their proper position in that
society. In M4, Must dominates; it evaluates, orders, commands, subordinates,
tests previous modes, either approving or disapproving them.
It seems that the modalities, in their order of development, are built one upon
the other, so that they accumulate into a more or less firm foundation. So essen-
tially the Must of S1 would never have any power over subjects until they have first
internalized it in their own Will (cf. Jaspers 1948: 423–435). Thanks to Will, the Da-
sein is not closed within its own world but reaches beyond it. There is illusion and
reality. Will tries to make illusions concrete realities. Thanks to Will, the Dasein
steps into history. With the energy of Will, we strive in our imaginary directive of
interiority toward real situations. So Jaspers conceives the energy and power of
Will as a kind of streaming force so that connects the various modes of being,
our M1–M2–M3–M4. Will “is not satisfied with satisfaction at one moment but
constitutes the ‘destiny’ and basis for the continuity of our existence” (ibid.: 425).
On the other hand, Will is at the origin of our semiotic acts. It is, as Jaspers well
observes (ibid.), “Duration as the continuity of sense” (Sie ist Dauer als Kontinuität
des Sinns). The first sign of the functioning of a will is bodily movement, which
should be seen as a continuation of our psychic events as they appear at a given
moment (Augenblick). For Jaspers, this is a truly magical moment because there
the spiritual directly intervenes in the psychic and physical world and causes a
change in our Dasein.
Therefore, “will” is the moment that recruits all the other modalities for its
fulfilment. It is the counterforce to the merely occurring, organic, or automatic
course from M1 to S1. So on one hand we have growth and becoming, fulfilment
and force; on the other hand, we have doing and goals (ibid.: 429). In this aspect,
Will might even seem to be something uncreative; it can only desire such things
that are given in that automatic process and set its goals according to the Know
of S2 and Must of S1.
Chapter 2
On the appearance or the present structure and
existential digressions of the subject
Motto:
Die Zeit ist die formale Bedingung
a priori aller Erscheinungen überhaupt
(Kant 1787/1986: 98)
2.1 Introduction
One does not need to know much history of semiotics in order to recognize the
background of my title. It is of course a paraphrase of Umberto Eco’s classic Strut-
tura assente (1968), whose outcome was one of the milestones in the history of
European semiotics. At that moment, everything had turned into ‘structural’. Lévi-
Strauss had already published his Anthropologie structurale (1962) – but why was
structure absent in Eco?
The thought reveals something quite essential in the history of structuralism
and the way of reasoning to which a grand part of semiotics has stayed faithful –
namely that the ‘true’ reality was not the one to be seen, heard and felt, but the
structure behind it, which causes it. The surface of the reality was only, as Greimas
said ‘effet du sens’, i.e., a meaning effect. In one word, the reality was only Schein,
like as early as Schiller and Kant taught, or appearance, or illusion.
What is involved is a kind of reductionism like as early as Mireille Marc-
Lipiansky remarked about Lévi-Strauss: réductionnisme qui cherche à ramener le
supérieur à l’inférieur (Marc-Lipiansky 1973: 136); in the same study, under the title
‘antihumanism’, she distinguished among four different phases: the reduction of
the individual into the collective, the reduction of the conscious to unconscious
categories, the reduction of consciousness into an unconscious combinatory,
which eliminates the creative activity of a subject and the historicity, and the
reduction of freedom into necessity. One could not in a better way resume the
issue. Without any doubt has this world view won when we look at the world
around us. Yet, it is the aim of this essay to attempt to show that there is an
alternative. There no phenomenon is reduced into anything else, but both the
individual, conscious, the phenomena of consciousness, creativity, historicity,
subject and freedom are possible – at least in theory. In order to convey the
idea in terms of the old-fashioned German humanism – which the Germans
themselves have tried to forget since Adorno and Benjamin: Den Sinnen hast
40 | 2 On the appearance
Du dann zu trauen, kein falsches lassen sie dich schauen, wenn dein Verständnis
dich wach erhält (Trust then in your senses, they do not betray you when your
understanding keeps you awake).
On the other hand, existentiality has reached former Paris school scholars
of semiotics. In his new theories (a.o. Présences de l’autre , Landowski 1997), the
social semiotician Eric Landowski has scrutinized semiotics of the life itself, even
if it were leading us to intuitive knowledge and a kind of ‘light’ semiotics. It is close
to phenomenology, to the notion of situation by Sartre, which Landowski admits
having used for a long time; in the end, what one encounters here is the semiotics
of experience and ‘being in the world’ (être au monde). It is essential that in this
new semiotics the crucial things are the digressions from a programmed beha-
viour. According to Landowski, a bee and a housewife are programmed entities:
“Where did you put my apples”, she asks when arranging things. They have to be
always in the same place, for instance at the piano. It would be senseless to ask
why it has to be so. The program entitles itself. But the existential behaviour is
irregular and breaks the ‘normal’ course. Therefore, we cannot presume, that it
would follow same laws as ‘programmed’, ‘natural world’. Existentiality is hence
a deviation from structure.
One does not need to search far from the artistic representation of this prob-
lem as it is the central theme in the trilogy by the Finnish movies director Aki
Kaurismäki in his films Drifting Clouds, The Man Without a Past and Lights in the
Dusk – particularly in the last mentioned (from 2006), in the most cogent but also
gloomiest and most apocalyptic manner.
The structure of the society is mostly there, it is not shown, it is ‘somewhere’
there, but its affirmative pressure has been denied by cinematic means, or as
Adorno put it: “The revolt against the appearance, the unsatisfied state of art
about itself, has been the recurrent motif in the request for truth in art . . . Art
has always strived for dissonance . . . the affirmative drive of society, with which
the aesthetic illusion has allied, has subordinated this aspiration” (Adorno
2006: 226).
In the Lights of the Suburb only the consequences are shown in the existential
vicissitudes of subjects, in their violence. The cinematographic Schein is at the
same time fascinating, but it serves the cause of uncovering ‘the truth of being’.
Accordingly, it does not remain mere ‘shine’, brilliance without foundation, or
lie, something which appears but is not. Hence existentiality and structure meet
each other and one always discovers subjects whose conduct is deviation from
structure, a challenge to it. When Kaurismäki was asked: “Are you an existential-
ist?” he responded: “ I do not know. Perhaps not, since then it would prove that
Sartre was not . . . .” (1988) (cited from v. Bagh 2006: 74). However, the principle
of hope by Ernst Bloch is realized still in the closing words of the movie: “Do not
go – stay here/Do not die/I shall not die of this” (ibid.: 210). It is hard to get rid
of the scheme: structure and its appearance. Yet in sociology we are taught that
structures are constructions in order to explain man’s behaviour.
The Phenomenology of Everyday Life by Alfred Schütz and Thomas Luckmann
investigates structures and discovers there even three kinds of transcendences:
a. minor everyday transcendences of type “I open the closet and take the coffee
cup from its familiar place”, i.e., I presume that it is there although I did not
perceive it;
b. middle: I encounter another person whom I suppose to be to some extent
similar to myself;
c. major: I return via a novel or a film to ancient Rome, or I am shifted to the
past, i.e., absent time, or to the future.
But altogether, when the structure has been ‘revealed’ or made manifest, it is
said that it dominates man’s actions, manifests in them, and hence it is reified as
something Yuri Lotman called ‘a generator of structurality’. Then how seriously
do we have to take the concept of Schein, illusion?
Many persons living in the contemporary world – those whom the ‘under-
standing’ still keeps awake – have noticed that there is more and more Schein
in the society, the reality has been made a spectacle, it has been ‘aestheticised’
(Wolfgang Welsch), it has been polished, but we cannot take it seriously, albeit
we live amidst it. The finer, the more glittering, the more colorful letter drops into
our mail box, the more probably we classify it as an ‘ad’ and throw it to trashes. So
senders have set forth to imitate ‘ authentic’ message and we can receive a letter
reminding misleadingly of a handwritten letter – where we are offered a.o. better
conditions of insurance. The more visually impressive a power point presenta-
tion is, the more we doubt whether its author has, in fact, anything important to
say. If the label of a wine bottle is very bright and tempting, we leave the bottle
on the shelf and grasp another one with an old-fashioned text. On stage, more
shocking than virtuoso acrobacy and physicality can be a calm reading of a text
in a darkened room. Even the corporeality can be Schein in the sense of a betrayal,
illusion. When the body is too gegenständlich (thinglike) it loses its credibility and
more impressive can be after all a transfigured body like in El Greco’s paintings.
Thus we can distinguish between what I have called ‘act-sign’ and ‘quasi-
sign’. But on which basis? By which quality do we recognize the Schein character
of a sign in our contemporary world of electronic communication? Doubtless must
there be in a sign some extra- or additional signs which provide us with a hint.
What are they? How can they be found? How do we find the right avenue amidst
the temptations of Schein?
2.2 More on vertical appearance
The idea of the appearance of the Schein is not quite a new finding; it dates
back to German philosophy. Kant spoke about it in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft
(1787/1969), Friedrich Schiller in his Briefe über ästhetische Erziehung (1795/2000).
Kant pondered over Schein in Critique of Pure Reason, in the chapter ‘Transcend-
ental aesthetics’. He argues how space and time determine all our perception
concerning both external objects and our own states of mind. Later on, Greimas
coined the terms interoceptive/exteroceptive (it is altogether not difficult to turn
Kant into semiotics in the framework of the Paris School). But then what is
involved is how the external and the internal world appear to our senses. From
this, one cannot yet reason that they were mere Schein (ein blosser Schein). As
early as this nuance represents the attitude that Schein is something less real
than objects as such. Nevertheless, it would be our own fault, according to Kant,
if we started solely on this ground to consider the entire objective reality a Schein,
in the sense of an illusion. Kant inquires: what is truth? Is it coincidence of
perception with its object? No, since perception is filtered by a priori categories.
On the other hand, formal logic is not the same as the logic of these perceptual
categories; by formal logic we cannot say anything about objective reality. One
needs a particular logic of Schein which Kant calls dialectic in order to talk about
how Schein, illusion, is related to reality – in other words, the program is the
same as the one which Thomas A. Sebeok declared two hundred years later as the
objective of semiotics: to study our illusions about reality, its various alternative
models, not reality as such.
In any case, in Kant the term Schein always appears in the context of bloss, but
he does not deny that it is also ‘real’ (Kant, op. cit.: 114–116). Adorno took this view
directly from Kant, Schein was illusion, phantasmagoria, which art paradoxically
has to deny and abolish by its own Schein.
Schiller became familiar with Kant’s thought immediately, and as one result
we have his famous letters about aesthetic education. Yet, the radical difference
from Kant was that he referred to the joy of Schein. The savage men became hu-
mans when they were detached from reality, when they started to take it as a play
and as a Schein, which could be appreciated as such.
The dissolution from interests of the reality towards the world of Schein was
a decisive step of progress for mankind.
We see by means of our eyes, we hear by means of our ears, but it is an entirely
different thing to feel with eyes and to experience the rhythm of the surrounding
world. As long as man is savage, he feels his emotions only with his senses but as
soon as he starts to enjoy what his eyes see and furnishes what he sees with its
own value, he is aesthetically free and the ‘play desire’ develops in him. Finally,
such a right and sincere Schein was to Schiller’s mind also moral, insofar as it
did not attempt to represent the reality, nor even when the reality used it as its
own representation. To strive for independent Schein more freedom of heart and
energy of will were needed than in order to dominate the reality.
Undeniably the sphere of morality also belonged to the universe of Schein; it
included two world views – we could continue from Schiller: either, a being is ba-
sically good and evilness mere Schein, or, goodness is apparent and evilness real.
In literature we encounter representatives of both directions: see, for instance,
the latter point dominant in novels by Céline, Camus, Sartre, while the former is
evident in Brontë, Tolstoi, Gide.
If the evil is basically veiled sacred, then how far can we live resorting to this
ad hoc hypothesis? How far can the Schein of the evil go, that we still believe in the
goodness of being looming behind it? According to another theory, the evilness of
a society falls upon an individual, causing the disillusionment, the cynic view –
or as Jean Cocteau put it: the society is a machine infernale in order to annihilate
the mortal – it is a kind of cruel play of the Gods. Even this theory certainly gets
evidence for its support.
Consequently, we have two basic theories of Schein: one that maintains it
as false, as illusion, betrayal; and the other one that considers it an independ-
ent, autonomous reality of its own, a great step of progress of humanity. How
these theories have been inherited by later discussion about Schein will be seen
soon. Likewise, the French phenomenologist Étienne Souriau, who also had an
impact upon early semiotic structuralism, like Sémantique structurale by Greimas,
and whose monumental knowledge of the whole 20th century was gathered in
a collective work Vocabulaire d’esthétique, gives new meanings to the terms of
apparence and apparition.
The term apparence is defined by Souriau as an aspect whereby an object
manifests, insofar as this representation then distinguishes itself from the ob-
ject thus becoming manifest. From this definition, furthermore three different nu-
ances open, which are:
1. the mere appearance of something to our senses, i.e., a phenomenon;
2. precisely the illusory appearance or illusion;
3. the appearance which presupposes some kind of judgement, i.e., is the same
as vraisemblance, verisimilitude. As far as what is involved is an illusion, we
speak for instance about the illusion of reality in painting or theater.
The ‘truth’ of theater is based upon three kinds of illusions: representation of emo-
tions of men, the illusion of time and place or diegesis and presentation of natural
or supernatural phenomena in order to provoke strong emotions in spectator or
in order to increase the credibility of the events on stage in general. The latter
case also leads to the term apparition which thus means appearance of something
surprising to the spectator. What appears can be a real person who indeed appears
at a right moment on stage, for instance the masked subscriber of Requiem in the
movie Amadeus by Forman; but it can also be a real person who is imagined to be
present; or it can be in reality a supernatural being – like Il commandatore at the
end of Don Giovanni.
It is evident that apparence corresponds to the German notion of Schein and
apparition to Erscheinung. Altogether, these cases deal with Schein as a vertical
phenomenon, in depth: it is something, somewhere – which, then, so to say, is
elevated to the surface of reality and manifests itself. Greimas’s theory of paraître
is also of this kind. In his well-known so-called veridictory square we act by cat-
egories of être and paraître, being and appearing. When they are negated we get
four cases; being, not-being, appearing, not-appearing. When they are situated
in the square, we get four meaning effects: truth, untruth, lie and secret, always
according to what the relationship of these categories is: truth is what appears and
is what it appears; lie is what appears but is not that; secret is something which
is but does not appear in any way and untruth is something which neither is nor
appears.
Figure 2.1: Greimas’s veridictory square
In fact it is already on this basis that we can sketch a theory of vertical Schein.
We notice how many topical problems of culture, art and philosophy find their
proper place in this framework. Regarding existential semiotics what is involved is
a theory of Dasein of course. Otto Lehto has proposed that Dasein is characterized
by its particular Da-signs. But to which extent are they in reality Da-shine in the
sense of brilliance, virtuosity and bravura of this term? Even though in shine there
is always the same danger as with Schein or it is always under certain conditions
the same as fake and illusions, the lie: All that glitters is not gold. Without love
the words are empty as the Bible says.
Thus, one has to distinguish between Pseudo-shine which belongs to the cat-
egory of vanity, and the authentic shine or brilliance, which is always based on
the ‘truth of being’. What is involved can be shine which has been gained by
work according to the protestant ethics. We accept richness if it has been obtained
by striving or overwhelming talents, but doubt nouveaux riches. On the symbolic
level, in a symphony, the law of thematic elaboration prevails: the victory finale
of the end has to be gained by the struggle of thematic actorial forces in music, in
their Durchführung and in the whole structure; if in music there is shine without
this work, it is entertainment, lower level shimmer. Yet, there is also brilliance
which is like gift of nature, proof of vitality, overwhelming energy, like in the
case of Australian aboriginal handicraft studied by Anne Hénault. The problem
of shine remains in the aforementioned distinction: from which signs can we dis-
tinguish between pseudo-shine and real, ‘good’ shine?
In order to do this we need to compare Schein to Sein – to continue our playing
with words. Appearance and being manifest in many forms and variations in the
history of ideas. First, we have a pair of concepts referring to this: structure and
ornament. One thinks that structure ‘is’ (i.e., it is real, it is something permanent),
whereas its decoration is merely the quality of surface.
It is required for a good work of art to contain a well-planned structure, which
can be deliberately decorated, but without such a structure one does not reach
a substantial impact. In music this is evident. The finale of the Quartet opus 30
by Ernest Chausson is real shine, brilliance, which for performers is a remark-
able technical challenge – but it turns out to be easier when one distinguishes in
music what is structure and what is figuration, ornamentation. In general, this
means to distinguish the important, pertinent elements from the less important,
i.e., between what is foregrounded and what is pushed towards the background.
In this case, we put in the background the brilliant figuration and in the fore-
ground there comes the structure, the substance. The very moment this cognitive
operation articulates the text in the performer’s mind, he makes it his/her ‘own’,
which leads to the right interpretation. For instance, the last pages of the Chaus-
son work are quasi-unplayable, namely, if one approaches it such as that all has
to be played with the same vigour. But when one notices that the octaves of the
pianist’s left hand actually duplicate the cello and alto theme in unison – which
is nothing else but the return of a variant of the ‘Parsifal’ theme from the slow
movement in this narrative climax (‘the return of the hero’), but now as euphoric
and brilliant – whereas the right hands of the pianist and of the violinist play mere
ornamentation to this structure, then the riddle of these pages is solved. What is
involved is authentic shine, which is based upon ‘truth of being’, i.e., the return
of the theme.
Moreover, the whole theory of simulacra, copies of reality as Schein, belongs
to this category. The doctrines of Jean Baudrillard get here a new dimension, just
as Eco’s theory of forgery. The problem of a forgery is not only in comparison of two
objects on the same level but in the shift of levels: in the dialectics of appearance
and being, in the Kantian sense.
Likewise, the theory of dreams represents the illusory nature of the oneiric
reality compared to being, to which we always wake up. Yet, the problem remains
like in the Chinese anecdote; there was a Chinese man who dreamed to be a butter-
fly; when he woke up he thought: am I now a Chinese who dreams to be a butterfly
or am I a butterfly who dreams to be a Chinese? Ingmar Bergman spoke about a
particular ‘moment of wolf’, which one experiences in the night, when the entire
daylight existence collapses as Schein and behind it the true reality is revealed,
which evokes one’s deepest values. One does not need to do anything any longer,
the lack has been liquidated. A respective mirror relationship appears between the
classical concepts of subject and object. Does the subject represent the ‘true’ being
and the objects the world of ‘appearances’ as Kierkegaard supposedly thought, or
is the world of objects real and the world of subjects Schein? The answer naturally
depends on epistemology, i.e., whether we adopt the idealist or realist attitude.
In the sphere of society one can ask: Is the ‘I’ the only certain thing and the
‘Other’ or ‘you’ Schein, which we can always reach only fragmentarily and hy-
pothetically by presuming that what occurs in ‘you’ is something similar as in
‘me’? This was the basic problem of the phenomenological sociology of Alfred
Schütz and Thomas Luckmann. On the level of culture and society Norbert Elias
has spoken about the difference between culture and civilisation, where culture
is spirit, depth, values – i.e., the German culture – and civilisation sensuality,
superficiality, matter – i.e., Italian-French culture. All trends of fashion of modern
contemporary culture would be thus put to the latter case. But behind fashion
there looms style, or as a French classic already said: the style is the man. We could
specify: man’s more stable essence, his identity. Style manifests – or appears – in
its variability as fashions, fashion elevates the style to its shine. Harri Veivo has
analysed the case of printing the name of Proust on a T-shirt. It is of course a blas-
phemy, iconoclasm regarding the authentic style represented by Proust. How the
‘Proustian’ body sits at a chair in a stylish and almost ‘transcendental’ manner: a
photo of Reynaldo Hahn. This is still style, identity, which appears as corporeal
signs (Veivo 2006: 40–41). Furthermore, from this we can infer the dichotomy
mind/matter or spirit and body. Even the earth spirit and matter (one young Tartu
semiotician studies the semiotics of the ‘Earth spirit’ manifest in certain ancient
woods in Estonia). Ultimately: transcendence and Dasein, where the true being
is transcendental and being-there only metaphor and, finally, as already said,
Da-shine.
The dichotomy of spirit and body constitutes a particular field of semiotic
problems of its own, which crystallizes in the opposition verbal/non-verbal. The
non-verbal in communication is, of course, gesturality. The Moscow linguist Nat-
alia Sukhova has divided the communication act into two aspects: the prosodic
nucleus or structure of the sentence, and its kinetic, gestural enactment. The ges-
ticulation is, thus, ‘appearance’ of communication, its visible side, its Schein.
Yet, the aforementioned two aspects go hand in hand: i.e., when a human
being speaks he/she gesticulates and mimics in order to make his/her speech per-
suasive. Fully gestureless or expressionless speech act would not guarantee the
understanding of the message, i.e., solely the prosodic nucleus is not sufficient.
In fact, this theory is close to the distinction of semiotics into signification (= pros-
odic nucleus) and communication (= kinetic gestures). True, a communication act
without gestures, Schein, can be used as an artistic device, like Aki Kaurismäki in
his movies. There famous, gestureless, overgrammatical dialogue is either a spe-
cial quasi-humoristic priem, artistic method, or one sign of social reification. It can
also be taken as a sign of total lack of modalisation which belongs to any ‘normal’
human communication, and leads into an immobile narrativity. For instance:
Man (M): What about electricity?

Anttila: Is included in the rent.
M: When can I move?
Anttila: As soon as I turn my back.
M: What about the keys?
Anttila: Do you see a lock anywhere?
M: I do not.
Anttila: Do not make sophistry or I take even the door with me. The cash is the rent of one
month.
M: You will get the money already tomorrow if God allows.
Anttila: His paths are unknown to me, but if you do not pay I shall send my killer dog to bite
your nose away.
M: Fine, it is making me only harm . . .
Particularly when one follows the filmic realisation of the scene the immobility
between the two subjects Mr. A and Mr. B (remember the diagram by Saussure!),
the emptiness of the modal space between them is strongly foregrounded.
However, any communication normally starts from the fact that we want to
say something and that this intention appears as a phrase and/or gesture. How-
ever, there are two alternative theories: either we think that intention is the signi-
fied, which has two parallel signifiers – the prosodic nucleus or the sentence AND
the gestures. These signifiers are either compatible or not (see Figure 2.2).
Or then we think that the core of the communicational act is the intention,
which then appears as a movement outwards, towards the Other, first as a sen-
tence – and then as a gesture. The gestures are, so to say, the utmost cover, the
surface of the fulfilment of the intention, its Schein (see Figure 2.3).
prosodic nucleus gestures

1st signifier 2nd signifier
intention
signified
Figure 2.2: Intention as signified with two signifiers
kinetic
gesturality
prosodic nucleus
(sentence)
intention
Figure 2.3: Intention as the core of communication
Both theories would have musical implications: in music we first have like-
wise the ‘prosodic nucleus’, i.e., the musical phrase which has as a syntactico-
morphological structure.
But thereafter such a musical phrase is provided with ‘gestures’ which, so to
say, ‘encrusts’ it. Accordingly, gestures could not be thought in music without the
nucleus phrase, gestures do not have their autonomous existence, they are totally
dependent on the nucleus phrase. Adorno said: gestures cannot be developed, the
development is only a quality of the musico-syntactic nucleus phrase. Even in
other respects of the Adornian theory, the opposed pole of Schein is ‘expression’,
Figure 2.4: Categories around being and appearance, and their empirical exemplifications
which is the only guarantee for the authenticity of communication. In fact, what
is involved is Husserl’s sign distinction: Ausdruckszeichen and Bedeutungszeichen
and its application, just as Alfred Schütz used it in sociology with the concepts of
Anzeichen and bedeutsame Zeichen (Schütz 1974: 166).
Yet, how is this related to my own theory of subject, in which Moi and Soi
struggle with each other so that Moi is the first mere gesture and then gradually
transforms into syntax when it meets the level of the social norms, topics, tech-
niques and styles of the Soi?
According to this, is there anything like pure gesturality, which is the origin of
music? The gestures and kinetics are the sphere of being-in-myself and being-for-
myself. But what is the status of gesture as a notion: Is it, so to say, a bridge from
an organism to its Umwelt, or are the gestures, after all, always directed towards
something, or intentional? Then, even the being-in-myself were intentional and
would manifest a movement out of me. In any case, the world of the Moi would
then represent authenticity and the one of the Soi, the Schein.
2.3 More on horizontal appearance
Nevertheless, in the aforementioned dictionary by Souriau there is a passage

which opens a different view. Namely, we find the following definition for the
term apparence: “Certain art works never appear to the spectator entirely and by
all parts simultaneously. The temporal arts like music, theatre and cinema, are
all based upon successive appearance” (Souriau 1990: 140).
Hence, when we join the idea of temporality – of succession, linearity, syn-
tagmaticity, seriality, unfolding, developing – to such a static concept like Schein
or being, we are led to a radically new theory. A naïve fact is that we can live
our lives only one moment at a time. So the reality all the time appears to us
temporarily, it has a certain rhythm, which we can, however, either decelerate or
accelerate, but which altogether proceeds irrefutably. We are all the time going to-
wards something unknown and unpredictable – we are all the time transgressing
some boundary – or moving towards transcendence. Just such an idea of bor-
derline did Schütz and Luckmann consider essential with transcendence. The
thought could be resumed in one phrase: the appearance (Erscheinen) is becom-
ing of transcendence (Werden der Transzendenz). Yet, not whatsoever becoming
is an ‘existential’ revelation or realisation of the transcendence, i.e., existential
choice. There is also ‘blind’ becoming, without any chosen direction, the prin-
ciple of laisser-aller, which means throwing and abandoning into the power of
uncertain future, perhaps its ‘narrative’ course leading assumingly into ‘good’.
The situation could be illustrated with the following scheme:
Figure 2.5: Appearance as becoming of transcendence
The modalities of existential appearance are: becoming (necessity) and doing

(freedom) and their alternation or balance.
One could say that the existential appearance is directed only by the Ich-
Ton, the identity of a subject (the concept has been borrowed from v. Uexküll’s
biosemiotics), but for which we cannot know in advance how it reacts in each
situation. Therefore, the Schein, which manifests the ‘truth of being’ as a kind of
figuration of a structure, its ornamentation, is not yet existential Schein in this
new sense. Similarly, the brilliance of the appearance, which is realisation of the
structure of being, is, of course, a kind of brilliance, but one has to distinguish
from it the shine which takes place in the choice at every moment, and the fact that
we are truly free to choose and not predetermined by any structural or ontological
principle.
Mozart’s music precisely fulfils this kind of idea of a continuous appearing
and play (Erscheinung und Spiel): we can never anticipate to which direction he
goes at each time. Therefore his music is always maximally informative – and
existential.
On the other hand, the brilliance presupposes one kind of modality, namely
the decisiveness. The hesitation cannot lead to brilliance – albeit hesitation is an
important category leading our subject from one Dasein to the other, as Pärttyli
Rinne has shown. Namely, hesitation is a sign of the fact that the subject is aware
of his/her being in a situation of choice, i.e., that he/she can choose. Without
such a freedom of choice, there would be no hesitation either, otherwise than as
a resistance to what happens in any case. Therefore existentiality cannot be but a
digression from the normal ‘appearance’ of a structure.
For instance a work which blindly follows some narrative scheme, actant
model, or generative course is not existential appearance, since there is nothing
surprising, stopping; it just occurs ‘organically’ (like the Schenkerian Urlinie
5–4–3–2–1 of tonal music).
A philosopher who has managed to portray this process very well is Karl
Jaspers in his Die Philosophie (Jaspers 1948). He first remarks that there is no
sense to speak about appearance when some being, thing appears in the world.
What is involved is not the ‘mere’ appearance of a ready object. In the appearance
we always face the appearance of some non-existing or transcendent to the
consciousness (Jaspers op. cit.: 43). Without transcendence the existence would
lose its proper being-in-myself and its orientation towards the world, its depth.
Man is possible existence, who via consciousness orients itself to the world and
establishes via the world a relationship to the transcendence (Jaspers op. cit.: 45).
Jaspers refers to v. Uexküll, but rejects his theory with the remark that man is not
the same as biological Dasein. The mere fact that he as a biologist investigates
it from his own point of view, shows that he is not only his own physical Dasein
but understands even other Daseins. Man is thus a ‘transcending’ animal one
could resume. (It seems that Jaspers did not yet realize the essence of Uexküllian
doctrine which , by no means, represents any reductionism in favour of anything
‘biological’ – on the contrary, in this theory even biology becomes communication
and semiosis.) From the viewpoint of transcendence this world is not only Dasein
but appearance. Insofar as man is not only a part of the world but can be freely
himself, he is possible existence. Transcendence opens to him expressly as a
possible existence.
If the possible is interpreted as ‘virtual’ what is involved is the realisation of
certain possibilities (Jaspers op. cit.: 71). Existence and transcendence ‘are’ there-
fore not as things ‘are’ in the world (this has been likewise emphasized by John
Deely in his semiotic philosophy, like in his Four Ages of Understanding). They
exist also for others. Dasein as being lives and vanishes. Yet, existence does not
recognize death. Dasein is empirically there, existence only as a freedom. Dasein
is completely temporal, but existence is in time more than time.
One would be attempted to add here the Lithuanian-Russian philosopher Lev
Karsavin (who was Greimas’s great idol, see Greimas 2001) and the term invented
by him: omnitemporality, which means a multidimensional virtual time. It is
analogous to the concept of plenitude by existential semiotics, whose opposed
pole, nothingness, would be just characterized by achronicity. Therefore we can-
not take it as granted that transcendence would somehow be a sphere devoid of
time; instead, one has to distinguish therein these two aspects.
World and existence are always in mutual tension, they can either be united or
separated. Existence is never general, but always particular. The objective reality
of the world and the existential reality both appear in time. The objective reality
has its own rules, like in history the law of cause and consequence. Instead, the
origin of the existential reality is just in time, in which it appears and is free.
Substances are in the objective reality a factor obstructing the time and follow
their causal laws. Compared to them the communication between existencies is
something quite different. The necessities of objective reality are opposed by the
time realized in a moment. Time in general is something measurable, objective
and real, and valid for all; the actualized existential time is based upon depth and
freedom. In the existential appearance one selects and decides just about some
particular time. Existence has just its own time, and not time in general. Existen-
tial temporality and appearance are characterized by leaps and transformation
(Jaspers, op. cit.: 309).
These starting points have immediate consequences even to such far-seeming
theory as semiotics. Namely, when in semiotics communication is the only prop-
erly dynamic temporal process in the mediation of message from destinator to
destinatee, we have here found a completely new deeper epistemic level: appear-
ance.
Appearance as the existentiality of subjects and appearance in general is a
still more fundamental category than communication. Which kind of semiotics
might emerge if we took this principle of horizontal appearance as our fulcrum?
Which kind of theory, which methods, which analyses? I already referred a.o. to
the new research program of Eric Landowski, ‘the semiotics of life’ and irregular-
ities, which are analogous to existential semiotics. But also new approaches may
emanate.
As such, there are no difficulties to bring the notion of transcendence into
semiotics. Semiotics as a study of signification and communication is, when we
think of it more closely, a completely transcendental discipline. Communication:
every act of communication is a leap to the unknown. When Mr. A says something
to Mr. B in the model by Saussure, he pursues a transcendental act, he cannot
know what will happen, he transgresses a borderline, he encounters the Other, the
unknown, of which he can only have presumptions, abductions but never certain
knowledge. Signification: if we take as our basis the oldest medieval definition
of it: aliquid stat pro aliquo sign is something which represents something ab-
sent, by signs we can talk about the absent, the transcendental. The signified is
always transcendental – every word, gesture, tone fulfils the minor transcendence
of Schütz and Luckmann. But when we moreover take into account that tran-
scendence in fact ‘is’ not but is always becoming via the appearance, many of
our traditional concepts are brought to a new light.
Transcendence as nothingness is just such in which the appearance has
stopped, the time has been finished, one is in a totally achronic state and nothing
more anguishing could one even imagine for a subject. Instead, transcendence
as a plenitude means the virtuality of innumerable possibilities, omnitempor-
ality, which only artists have been able to conceive and simulate: Wagner in
the networks of his leitmotifs in his operas and Proust by the time dimensions
going to all direction in his novels. These simulacra, i.e., models, are Schein
which corresponds to the ‘truth of being’. Their modus is appearance, linear and
horizontal.
Chapter 3
Representation in Semiotics
3.1 The relation of representation in semiotics
The notion of “representation” does not come up so frequently in encyclopaedias

and dictionaries of semiotics – least, not at first sight, although it is the basis of
the entire discipline. To signify, to express, to convey, and more; all these semiotic
mechanisms rely on representation in the sense of one thing standing for another.
It concerns not only the supposition of becoming detached from the meta-level of
reality, but also the demand for faithful (re)presentation so as to effect iconicity.
The epistemic level, according to Kant, has to do with the filtering of external
reality into our consciousness via categories. A modern version of this theory is
biosemiotics, according to which the so-called external reality does not exist as
an objective entity; there are only signs picked up from the environment (Umwelt)
by an organism. These are discerned, or “marked”, according to the capacities of
sense organs, and reacted to in certain activities (Wirken). In this we arrive at the
classical problem which occupied structuralists and post-structuralists: Is there a
reality beyond signs or “texts”? If so, can it be reduced to representation?
Correspondingly, deconstructionists in the wake of Derrida believed that text
was everything; all was in text and in “writing”. Yet the Paris school semioticians,
as pupils of Greimas, were fascinated by the problem of how to create an illusion
of reference, by which textual mechanisms one could bring about the impression
of a discourse realistically portraying reality, as in the natural sciences. Accord-
ingly, representation can be conceived as a kind of similarity or correspondence
between sign and reality. We speak of “representative” and “non-representative”
arts, and also of prescriptive and descriptive representations, discussed later in
this chapter. By the former we can reproduce the represented object; for instance
in music by notes, in drama by dialogue, and so on. In the latter we aim to portray
the reality more or less adequately, but in a less rigorous way.
However, representation can be also interpreted as a process as in existential
semiotics, where it occurs as the change of a pre-sign into an act-sign and further
into a post-sign. In this chain of signs becoming something, the act-sign can be
considered a representation of the pre-sign, when we can accept as a pre-sign any
virtual idea, value, or intention. Here we may ask, for instance, At what point does
a pre-sign become “ripe” or mature enough to be represented? If we presume that
the everyday reality of our Dasein is surrounded by transcendence, then next we
must ask how transcendence is represented in our world.
3.2 Mapping representation | 55
According to Solomon Marcus, transcendence appears to us only as meta-

phors, whose origin is corporeal. On this view, an art work is thus a representation
of an aesthetic idea or intention. A moral act is a representation of an ethical
value, which brings it from a virtual mode of being into the actual. If we artic-
ulate subjective reality by categories of Being and Appearing, it is clear that the
capacity of Appearance (Schein) to represent Being varies. Misrepresentation or
under-representation may occur, when the Schein of Appearance becomes mere
shine or brilliance.
3.2 Mapping representation
Representation necessitates a shift from the universe of things to their signs, or

as Peirce called them, their “representamina”. Some, like Peirce, wanted to pre-
serve the original idea of representation by using the Greek word, representamen,
instead of “sign”. Both Anglo-analytic philosophy and the human sciences in gen-
eral take seriously the idea of representation, such that we no longer speak about
things themselves but about their linguistic signs: in a two-place relationship of
representation, the first term, the one which represents, becomes more important
than the second, that is to say, that which is represented, the reality itself. As early
as in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason the thing itself, the reality an sich, became a
transcendental entity, about which we could know only via its representations
by categories of time, place, and subject. The crisis of representation was already
there. It was argued that, if the basic idea of representation was a kind of corres-
pondence between the sign and its object, then one could know nothing about
the object without a certain mediation supplied by structures, mechanisms of
discourse, and other linguistic means.
To say that something represents something implies a very strong presump-
tion that the representation hits its target with precision. But if I say that some-
thing only signifies or conveys or expresses something, then the relationship
between x and y, representamen and object, is taken to be less precise, “softer”.
Altogether, the problem of representation is to a great extent the same as the
contrast between realism and nominalism: representation is clearly on the side
of a realist epistemology; the essential matter is not the relationship – nor word –
as in nominalism. The history of semiotics can be roughly simplified as the fight
between these two principles. On the one side are the realists, beginning with the
Scholastics, who took an achronic, paradigmatic, vertical view of representation:
the sign is set “above” its object, but temporally at the same point, a kind of “now”
moment in which representation takes place. On the other side, in nominalism we
pay attention to the horizontal dimension: a word refers to a word, a sign to a sign,
56 | 3 Representation in Semiotics
one unfolding from the other in a process, referencing each other in an endless
series. Thomas A. Sebeok saw one side of semiotics – this kind of interminable
chain of dictionary definitions. If we ask what the word “pupil” means, it refers
to the word “to learn”, then to “teacher”, then to “school”, to “education”, and
on and on. We end up with endless semiosis operating by a chain of signs. The
other side of semiotics is a dynamic and mobile notion, which designates the
transmission of signs from sender to receiver. We should add, however, that even
signification can be conceived as a process, and not necessarily an endless one.
Nevertheless, one can say in principle that American pragmatist semiotics
starts from realism, the position consciously adopted by Charles S. Peirce, who in
his correspondence with Victoria Lady Welby mocked the nominalists as “schol-
ars” on the level of wine tasters. By contrast, the European branch of semiotics (or
“semiology”) has clearly proved more nominalist, a trait culminating with the de-
claration, “Il n’y a pas d’hors texte!” Yet this distinction is truly rough, and imme-
diately we encounter contradictions. Structuralists were on the latter side. But let
us recall the debate waged in the 1960s between ontological and methodological
structuralism. Eco criticized Lévi-Strauss for the aforementioned metaphysical
view that structures exist only as an algebra of the human brain, a claim Lévi-
Strauss made in his argument about mythical thought. Eco put much energy into
establishing realist semiotics as an empirical science, and also into dismantling
pseudo-realism, in his famous critiques of iconicity.
To the European school of semiotics, insofar as we think of it beginning with
Saussure, representation seemed to be no problem: to represent was always ar-
bitrary, or conventional, with some exceptions, such as motivated signs or icono-
graphies, as in onomatopoeia and similar. It is interesting to note how circular
figures were in fashion. Saussure represented linguistic signs with a drawing of a
tree, while at the same time the Czech composer Leoš Janáček represented musical
meanings likewise, with a circle model, as Tiina Vainiomäki (2012: 210 and 269)
(see Figure 3.1).
There are two species of representation: vertical and horizontal, achronic and
diachronic, paradigmatic and syntagmatic. In principle this dichotomy seems to
coincide with that of realism and nominalism. For instance, such trends in semi-
otics as Derrida’s “deconstruction” represent the latter, in which writing is crucial
and concepts, which refer to each other in endless discourse, are overlooked. His
source of inspiration was Heidegger’s philosophy, of which von Wright said that
its difficulty – or profundity – lodged upon the fact that everything said referred
to what had been said and what was going to be said. One can almost see some-
thing cultural in this dichotomy: Anglo-Saxon scientists are easily positivists and
behaviorists who search for the ultimate interpretant of all symbols in the brain
3.3 Nöth’s handbook | 57
Figure 3.1: The models by the Czech composer Leoš Janáček on a) word and ‘center’ of con-
sciousness (1923) and b) the structure of the expressive-rhythmic figure, scasovka (1927); the
diagram by Saussure (1916)
and genes; whereas those in Latin and Roman culture produce endless discourse
around an issue, consider it barbaric to name it directly.
The very history of semiotics turns on the issue of representation and its ar-
ticulation, and deserves a proper position in the encyclopaedia of our knowledge.
Next I present some cases of the latter, paying special attention to the shifts and
overlapping among categories of representation.
3.3 Nöth’s handbook
An excellent overall presentation of representation in semiotics can be found in

Winfried Nöth’s Handbook of Semiotics (2000 [1994]). He properly views it as one
of the key concepts of semiotics since the Scholastics and also as a central issue in
cognitive semiotics. Nöth also mentions the broad field of meanings linked to so-
cial representations; for example, in political-juridical semiotics, referring to rep-
resentatives in elections and to the art-word “representations” which courts use
to designate witnesses’ testimonies. The notion of representation appears in the
history of semiotics often as a synonym for sign, beginning with John Locke (Nöth
2000: 162). Representation often refers to the object to be represented and by this
means also to the referent. Hence we find such concepts in German philosophy as
Darstellung and Vorstellung. Then it is conceived often as a phenomenon opposed
to that of communication. For instance, Husserl’s “inner monologue” does not
convey anything in the communicative sense, but doubtless represents something
to the subject itself. In existential semiotics this can be interpreted as a relation or
phenomenon whereby the subject maintains inner dialogue between Moi/Soi. Fi-
nally, Nöth mentions a nuance that occurs as early as with William Occam, which
refers to the fact that at the same time as when one re-presents, or makes some-
thing present again, one also “re-calls” something, a phenomenon not unrelated
to the existential-semiotic underscoring of the importance of memory.
Are there signs that represent nothing? Nelson Goodman developed a philo-
sophical theory of representation in his work Languages of Art (1976), by which
he means the closest visual representation. Among others, his term “exemplifica-
tion” evokes this meaning: a tailor makes a proof example of a dress, by which one
gets to the idea of a model. In the background, of course, stand Peirce’s conceptual
pair: type and token. The latter an occurrence, an exemplification, of some type;
for instance, a sonata by Beethoven or Mozart is an exemplification of sonata
form, the type. Generally speaking, this involves a relationship to some more or
less stable and fixed point of departure, the object that is “represented”; of course,
the intentions of emotional expression lie beyond this relationship. Husserl, how-
ever, distinguished Bedeutungszeichen, which names and represents things, from
Ausdruckszeichen, which contains intention and expression.
Nöth also speaks about the “crisis of representation”. The latter was precipit-
ated by Michel Foucault, who showed that in the classical age (seventeenth cen-
tury) there occurred a transfer from iconic similarity between sign and world, to a
dyadic, arbitrary, and conventional representation, which climaxed of with Saus-
sure. From this emerged the so-called classical representation model, in which
the linguistic order determined the “order of things”, the title of one of Foucault’s
books. The classical model fell into crisis when at the beginning of the nineteenth
century emerged a historical view of the inner development of things, which had
its own logic. Nowadays “crisis of representation” has come to designate the post-
modern notion that signs have no fixed and stable referent, that world has dis-
solved into various discourses and habits, which constitute their own rhizomatic
mass. No model of representation can be seen as privileged over any other. In
semiotics, among other fields, this meant a rejection of the generative model, that
is, the idea that surface signs can either derive from a single deep structure or
be reduced to one. In consequence, all manners of representation have become
acceptable and exist together, side by side. We may illustrate this situation with
John Cage who, when asked if he liked the symphonies of Beethoven, replied, Yes,
if they are played all at the same time.
3.4 Representation in philosophy – John Deely
John Deely’s monumental work Four Ages of Understanding (2001) is a total

presentation of the history of Western philosophy in the light of the notion of
sign. In it a central role is assumed by the concept of representation in different
ages. Deely considers the progress of philosophy in view of the fact that things
3.5 Peirce | 59
are discussed as signs and not as ideas. Representation as a concept is something

definite, determined, fixed. He argues that words signify, but only concepts
represent. What is problematic in defining the field of representation is that it can
only refer to the structure of our sense data; that is, the information that comes
to our senses “represents” external reality to us, but of this reality we can know
nothing. Kant, of course, took this view, but it occurs as early as in Leibniz’s
“monads”. Though each monad represents external reality in its own peculiar
manner, there prevails however considerable equality and consensus among
different individuals about how that reality is represented to us. This is possible,
thinks Leibniz, thanks to a harmoniousness among men that was pre-established
by God. On the God-idea, Deely writes: “Leibniz . . . explained communication
ultimately through the hookup of the individual monads with the Divine Monad,
the great communication satellite in the sky that made ‘my representations’
correspond with yours and so on for every other creature forming and projecting
its own private representations” (Deely 1990: 10). For Deely, the essential task
is to distinguish between sign and representation, and therefore signification
and representation. Confusion enters via the fact that every sign must be a
representation, not every representation needs to be a sign. In other words, a
sign is always a representation of some type. Here Deely thinks realistically that
every sign has an object, and that behind it is the dynamic object, a real thing.
In our view, representation can be purely transcendental as a relationship: a sign
is always also an ontological relationship. Even in transcendental relationships
there is a distinction between object and sign.
3.5 Peirce
The best-known theory of representation in Anglo-analytic philosophy is the tri-

adic model by Charles S. Peirce, in which the representamen is able to represent
some object only because a secondary signum, the interpretant, connects them.
In Peirce’s model the object of representation is already a “semiotic” entity, but
behind it looms the “dynamic object”, which is a real entity. As Eco says, it “kicks
off” the semiosis. Likewise, behind the interpretant is the “dynamic interpretant”.
Peirce’s model is based upon his phenomenal categories of Firstness, Second-
ness, and Thirdness. From this model follow nine different sign categories, and
moreover an endless number of their combinations. European semioticians have
criticized the model, using the argument of Occam’s razor, that Peirce’s concep-
tion of sign is unnecessarily broad. Nevertheless, Peirce’s model has been de-
veloped further and applied to practical semiotic analyses, according to the prin-
ciples of pragmaticism, and “-ism” which he himself founded.
One variation of Peirce is found with the Danish literary semiotician Jørgen
Dines Johansen, who has elaborated his own so-called pyramid model. The lat-
ter combines two semiotic subjects, author and reader – the author insofar as
there is always someone who produces the sign, and the reader since someone
always receives and interprets it. In the same way as Peirce distinguished between
the immediate object and the interpretant, Johansen differentiates the empirical
and the modeling author and reader. This idea stems from the classical notion
in literary semiotics of implied author and implied reader. Johansen believes this
interpretation to exist immanently in Peirce’s model, but he provides it with new
dimensions by explicating this immanent or “hidden” nominalism. Peirce was
himself a natural scientist who aspired to reveal objective rules of the sign as a
kind of natural law.
Our introduction of the subject, however, changes the situation and in fact
distances our model from realism. The process of representation is not at all un-
equivocal, definite, or fixed. For example, the implied author/reader and empir-
ical author/reader are realities of different degrees, and this makes misunder-
standings possible. The semiosis can go wrong, say, if the empirical author uses
in his representamen certain rhetoric by which he wishes to affect the empirical
reader, but addresses his speeches incorrectly to the wrong implied reader. Such
rhetoric does not serve him properly, because he has an errant view of his own
implied reader. Another problem with Peirce’s model is how the dynamic object
can produce a direct object. Does this take place as a kind of causal relation, as
organic development, or as transformation?
The weakest aspect of this kind semiotics is that, even though it emphasizes
the processual and the dynamic, it remains completely immanent; it cannot be
used for critical evaluation or judgment of phenomena. True, it portrays quite
efficiently the functioning of a phenomenon, but remains on that phenomenon’s
level. In this way, Peircean or Peirce-based semiotics preserves some neutrality,
but it is an easy target to those critics who accuse semiotic analyses to be purely
of technical interest.
3.6 Model theory
The phenomenon of representation is closely linked also to scientific modeling

and to the notion of model in general. The scientist who elaborates and devel-
ops models to portray certain phenomena also produces their representations
as kinds of artefacts. Tarja Knuuttila, in her dissertation Models as Epistemic
Artefacts: Toward a Non-Representationalist Account of Scientific Representation
(2005), collected her observations into four main points, two of which follow here.
3.7 From cybernetics to cultural semiotics | 61
(1) It is not necessary to deal with the whole philosophical field of representation,
since models can represent but also misrepresent. (2) It is often unclear what
scientific models represent; it is better rather to talk about how models “render”
or “translate” instead of how they represent. Above all, models can have many
uses other than representations. For instance models are often situated in some
intermediate terrain between representing and experimenting. On the other hand,
the ways in which models are constructed amount to more than “representing
something”. This point in turn emphasizes the materiality of the model.
Ronald Giere, a professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota, and
Knuuttila together discussed the notion of model and its relation to representa-
tion. Giere noticed that representation had been pondered in the history of philo-
sophy in three ages: in antiquity, the Middle Ages, and in the twentieth century. He
referred to the studies by Hintikka and v. Wright. But when Knuuttila brought un-
der the same roof such different orientations as logic, semiotics, technology, and
literature, the pragmatic aspect was underlined, but was it carried too far? Models
are something by which one does something. In most pragmatic cases, models are
used to produce certain things, whereas scientific models are without exception
abstract, and none of them corresponds to the reality. Here the semiotic approach
offers the answer: models are material symbols, but they refer to abstract entit-
ies. For instance, economic models do not have a concrete object such as “the
economy”. Models are not representations but interactive units. In semiotics we
meet with different kinds of signs, some are about material objects, others about
immaterial objects, but signs themselves always have a material aspect.
3.7 From cybernetics to cultural semiotics
The issues and definitions above reflect in every point some broader problems
connected to models. For the first, the concept of model is central in cybernetics,
which has fed into many other disciplines since the latter half of the twentieth
century, not the least of which is semiotics. Georg Klaus, in his dictionary of cyber-
netics, speaks about his method of modeling. He distinguishes between two types
of model: models as tools to acquire knowledge, and models to regulate dynamic
systems and their functioning. Klaus’s view of models is completely pragmatic, as
representations, can be either ideal or material formations. Hence one may build
models of purely semiotic abstract sign systems, as is the case with mathematical
and logical models. But they can also be real in a certain material-energetic sense.
Hence they can be artificial or natural.
Klaus describes the building of models as an interactive process between
model and object (reality), in which the subject of the model (man) makes models
on the basis of his knowledge of objects, both their material and ideal aspects,
and by applying analogies – as iconic and indexical sign relations – between both
realms. The model has to represent the original. Yet by influencing the model and
observing the results one can gather more information about both the model and
its object. A model can always be improved. On the basis of test results, analogies
between model and object can be strengthened. The process continues until the
model is a satisfactory image (icon) of the original. Results are achieved gradually
by correcting the model and by presenting several versions of it. The cybernetic
model, a kind of gradually developing representation of the reality, is under
perpetual correction. On this view, representation is far from a fixed relationship,
but rather a constantly changing process.
Cybernetics was one of the background influences on semiotics in the 1960s,
particularly in the USSR. There the so-called Tartu-Moscow school of cultural se-
miotics drew from like information theory, computer studies, and cybernetics. The
famous distinction between primary and secondary modeling systems emerged
from this context. Thomas A. Sebeok, in his A Sign Is Just A Sign (1991), asked in
what sense language would be a “primary modeling system”; for his answer, he
quoted the classical definition by Yuri Lotman:
. . . a set of elements and rules of their combination which has a keen analogy with the whole
field forming the object of the study. Therefore modeling systems can be taken as language
and systems which utilize natural language as their basis and thus create additional super-
structures, can be called correspondingly secondary modeling systems.
(Lotman, quoted in Sebeok 1991: 50)
As Sebeok proposes, Lotman’s definition is “cybernetic” as opposed to stemming

from Uexküll’s.
Lotman’s primary modeling system, or natural language, is a kind of repres-
entation of reality. He is strongly structuralist when he takes natural language as
the basis of other, secondary sign systems. Some have argued that the talk about
primary and secondary modeling systems was an euphemism in the USSR of
the 1960s. There official Marxist theory prevailed, and spoke of a superstructure
which causally reflected the substructure. However that may be, only in the
light of representation can we understand the thesis that Sebeok often declared,
namely that language did not emerge for communication but for modeling or
representing reality. Sebeok argues that language developed as an adaptation;
speech was born as a derivative phenomenon of language over the course of two
million years. Language consisted of a set of traits, which were created for the
purpose of cognitive function of modeling, and not at all for communication, that
is, the transmission of messages (Sebeok refers to Chomsky and Popper to support
his thesis). For communication, nonverbal transmission emerged in all animal
3.8 Representation as function | 63
species, and it continues to function in all human interaction. To Sebeok’s mind,

language is in the first place a representational system, not a communicative one
(Sebeok 1991: 56).
3.8 Representation as function
Eco in his earlier semiotic output pondered upon a special kind of representation,
namely iconicity, the relations of sign and object based upon similarity. He took
pains to show that iconicity is ultimately nothing but a “natural” category. In this
respect he stands in the line of European semiotics, such that via analyses one
aims to show that many semiotic entities taken as natural and given are basically
conceptual constructions and social practices – which could therefore be oth-
erwise. In this respect Eco heads in the same direction as the Paris School and
Roland Barthes. He proposes that the iconic relation be seen rather as a relation
of description between two universes, which consist of a certain amount of ele-
ments. Universe A is an iconic sign of Universe B, a representation, if those two
universes have a sufficient number of common elements. What is involved is a
transformation between two worlds and shapes.
As a continuation of this theory, Eco developed his theory of fakes and for-
geries, which questions under what conditions A is not the same as B, although
someone claims that it is. This is a case of failed or unsuccessful representation,
of apparent or quasi-representation. In the end, such a misuse of representation
in order to cheat is reduced to the Greimassian categories of Being and Appearing.
Something that first is is then compared to something that appears to be what it
really is not. Representation is always Appearance, paraître.
In his newer theories of semiotics, Eco underlines the role of the Dynamic
Object (Peirce) in representation. He has come to this position through viewing
in new ways the category of Being. We noted in the preceding chapter that, as a
realist semiotician Eco (1997), argues that Being exists before one speaks about
it. Being precedes our discourse, and it is something to which our speech is com-
pared if we want to clarify whether it is true or not. We also noted that Eco’s view is
in principle the same as Peirce’s: that behind the objects of signs lies the so-called
dynamic object, which is and which precipitates the semiosis.
Eco had in his earlier work Les limites d’interprétation (Eco 1992: 59–61) writ-
ten of Heidegger as a kind of hermetic mystic who supposed that behind all signs
and words there was some real Being which only the elect or “called” could attain.
Now Eco allots positive attention to him. Yet in Heidegger, being always turns on
the fact that being, Seiende, appears in Dasein most readily as my being-there, and
therefore we cannot talk about being other than by talking about ourselves. With
this, as we pointed out in Chapter Three, the category of subject is introduced.
3.9 The archaeology of Foucault
In French philosophy, even before Eco, one finds reflections on similar issues, in
both structuralist and phenomenological schools. Michel Foucault’s Les mots et
les choses (1970) dealt expressly with the problem of representation in European
culture. He started from the genuinely structuralist hypothesis that the true real-
ity was not the one which was seen (unlike in empiricism), nor the one which
a subject believed to be reality (unlike in existentialism, although Sartre had ar-
gued that consciousness was always consciousness of something). Rather, reality
was hidden in its own universal archaeological level. From this perspective, all
the various historical phases with their discontinuities proved to be illusory in
their differences. What this involves, basically, is the question of how, in that
cultural deep level, the categories of similarity and difference in representation
were already determined.
Foucault wants to concentrate on the level which precedes that of phenom-
enal perception, which in fact decides even our most naïve, everyday experience.
For Foucault, nothing is more empirical and practical than the way things are
set in “order”. Moreover, Foucault situates this order in the things themselves
as their inner law, a concealed network which also establishes the manner in
which they relate to each other. This order also manifests in such networks as that
of the glance, research, language. These networks, or “basic codes”, rule over a
culture’s language, perceptual frames, values, and practices, and also form the
empirical order by which one operates and in which one feels comfortable. He
speaks here about the level of representation of the reality as preceding everyday
experience, which at the same time articulates the reality. At the other extreme,
of course, there are abstract scientific theories and philosophical interpretation
which explain why a certain order exists altogether.
It is interesting that Foucault postulates between these two spheres of repres-
entation a third sphere, in which culture deviates, unnoticed, from the order of
primary codes, which are none other than Lotman’s primary modeling systems,
though Foucault does not mention them. This third sphere differs from them; it
abandons the invisible forces represented by primary codes, and once liberated
from them, may notice that that “order of things” is perhaps not the only pos-
sible one, nor the best. For Foucault, here lies the possibility of change in culture,
and the existence of this level explains the epistemic crises in European culture.
Between the “coded eye” (or ear we might add!) and reflexive knowledge is a
3.9 The archaeology of Foucault | 65
middle sphere, which deliberates the order itself. The Foucauldian man takes his
position here, as a subject who is only a recent discovery.
Foucault illustrates with an analysis of Vélasquez’s painting Infanta, in which
the viewer of the painting – the subject – is drawn into its particular system of
representation. We, as subjects, look at the picture of a place in which the painter
in turn looks at us. In his analysis Foucault excludes all contextual knowledge,
such as proper names like Philip II, Marguerita, and other known figures. We must
stand before the painting as if we did not know who is reflected in the depths of
the mirror, and we have to study this reflection by means of its own concepts.
On the one hand, Foucault’s analysis is hermeneutic – not without reason did
he study the Swiss Heideggerian Binswanger. That is to say, he starts from a certain
pre-understanding of the painting. Yet at the same time he denies the naïve rep-
resentational pre-understanding in the form of historical facts, and encourages us
to scrutinize only a structural-visual composition of the painting, which has been
set up to serve his analysis of the relationship of representation.
Such a hypothetical, zero-point of research is far from, say, the American
“Grounded-theory method”, which operates on the belief that research can
“objectively” reveal all of its object, by allowing the empirical object to speak
and organize itself. The psychoanalyst Medard Boss (1953) claims, for instance,
that the emergence of perspective grew out of profound epistemic concepts. The
masterworks of Japanese painting were without perspective. The spirit of Eastern
culture was oriented toward abandoning any tension of I/not-I – an opposition
that is central to Vélasquez’s painting. The notion of perspective was also alien to
the ancient Greeks. For them the essential phenomenon was ergon, the beings of
the world and their inherent energies. Man began more and more to believe that
it was he who, as a thinking and imagining entity, provided the world with sense.
More and more people started to take the essential content of things to be the
result of human activity. This standpoint culminated in the Cartesian res cogitans,
which seated the subject on its chair of honor; and from this also emerged
perspective in painting. One might add to this the principle of “tonality”: in music
there grew the idea of one tonal center, the Being of the tonic as the basic musical
actor and subject, from which everything departs and to which everything returns.
Foucauldian reasoning on cultural archaeology and representation runs
along the same lines as that of Boss (1953):
No science can appear without the prescientific leading thread of its thought . . . . Never has
man lived amidst a senseless chaos, to which only scientific scholar would bring their sense
without any prejudice. Always there is rather somewhere some weak and unexplainable
view on the essence, a certain although completely unconscious metaphysics, a general idea
of the true nature of things . . . Therefore all scientific explanations are only clean explana-
tions and distinctions of a certain prescientific world understanding.
It is astounding that biosemiotics, a new branch of the discipline, supports this

view. Jakob v. Uexküll’s Umwelt model tells that an organism receives signs from
its environment on the basis of codes typical of its species, which thus serve as a
kind of representational filter between it and the reality. As discussed earlier, he
called this filter the Ich-Ton, which as a kind of “score” determines those stimuli
from the external world that are allowed to “play” in the organism. His view,
epistemically, was completely Kantian – as was all structuralist thinking, even
Foucault’s. Thure v. Uexküll completed his father’s theories by the notion of the
so-called endo-genic signs. Inside the organism communication takes place, of
which the organism is not conscious at all; paradoxically, the organism is con-
scious only of exo-genic signs, those coming from outside. In the interaction of
endo- and exo-genic signs emerges the reality of an organism; nothing like ob-
jective reality exists in this theory. Representation as the passive registration of
external signs is totally alien to biosemiotics. It is therefore anything but the reduc-
tion of semiosis to biology. On the contrary, it is proving biology to be semiotics.
3.10 Existential semiotic interpretation
Essential to the theory of existential semiotics is the idea of the becoming of signs,
their constant motion and change. Also crucial is the journey between two do-
mains or worlds, between Dasein, the empirical reality, and transcendence which
lies outside it, in absentia, but present in our minds. How something absent can
be present of course leads to issues of representation. In addressing this mat-
ter, we must also note that, in semiotics, there is no abrupt borderline between
Dasein and transcendence. Rather, the idea of transcendence and the material
signs represent the two extremes of the same continuum; somewhere in-between
lies the limit whose transgression means the act of representation. Every culture
determines this borderline: where “reality” stops and “representation” begins.
Representation is altogether the filter which selects the transcendence and lets it
manifest in the Dasein. If one thinks of an organism or subject in his Umwelt, one
should distinguish two kinds of representation. (1) The first representation takes
place in the subject’s concrete milieu regulated by the Ich-Ton of the organism.
(2) The second representation occurs when the virtual ideas of transcendence area
actualized and realized in the Dasein.
It is clear that representation is also a modal concept. In Greimas’s theory it
returns to the relationship of Being and Appearing: representation is how Being
manifests in Appearing. Yet, if we are dealing with a subjective reality, it is already
as such modal by its nature. On the basis of the Greimassian category of being
(être), I have tried to make the notion more subtle, and using the notion of an-mir-
sein to an-sich-sein, develop a theory of the existential semiotic subject, which

lives in an interaction of four instances and dialectics. To review: these are the
categories of an-mir-sein and für-mich-sein or what can be called, the Moi, me,
which develops from its primal kinetic-physical state into a personality. On the
other side are the categories für-sich-sein and an-sich-sein, which represent the
socially determined side of the subject, the Soi. It is in the movement of Moi to-
wards Soi where a shift occurs, from abstract codes to social practices and their
representatives in various professions and societal roles. Correspondingly, the Soi
diminishes in its movement towards Moi, such that concrete social practices re-
treat into representations and “ideas” projected within the Moi.
It is clear that the pertinent action in this model takes place among these four
instances via particular kinds of signs, by which we are transported from modes of
Being to modes of action via signs, we may even say, via representational models.
We must also take care to note how the subject represents to itself these phases
when we are dealing with signs intended for self-reflection and introspection.
Schelling’s distinction of two kinds of action, Handeln and Schauen, are precisely
equivalent to our distinction.
In the earliest version of my model, the modes of Being were on the one hand
Hegelian and on the other hand Greimassian, as represented by static categories
on the “semiotic square”. Since then the Z-model has developed, as discussed in
Chapter One, to depict the essential movement from Moi to Soi, from pure corpor-
eality (M1) to a stable body or personality (M2). From there onward the motion
is toward the representation of the body in social roles and professions (M3), up
to the abstract norms and values of a society (M4). In addition, the motion may
be from Soi to Moi, from norms (S1) to their “exemplifications” or representations
in social institutions and practices (S2), further to their functioning via recruiting
suitable persons S3, and finally to the impact of norms on the body (S4). Thus
corporeality always contains at least some Soi and correspondingly, in the most
abstract social norms there is a trace of body, or Moi. The model itself describes
the world of Dasein, which lives in constant tension between me and society. The
model also portrays events and representations within the subjective mind. All
four instances, from M1 to S1, function as internalized in our minds; hence the
Z-model explains why we are more than mere corporeality, mere biology, and it ex-
amines why and how society has penetrated into us, making us social. The proper
and explicitly semiotic question is: How is this process of Dasein represented by
signs and texts? All of this is illustrated in Figure 3.2 where the broken-line circle
of Dasein serves as the representation of the primal Dasein.
Representation is not unilinear in its signifying. There are at least seven sub-
categories: (1) spherisation (after Valsiner), concerning the spheres of the social
Me; (2) simultanisation, the simultaneously superimposed presence of all mo-
Moi
M1 M2 M1 M2
(S4) (S3) (S4) (S3)
S2 S1 S2 S1
(M3) (M4) (M3) (M4)
Soi
Figure 3.2: Representation of the Dasein
ments; (3) localization refers to the fact that, in the representing text, the modes
of Being are localized to certain places; (4) temporalisation, such that the modes
appear as a time continuum; (5) Widerspiegelung, a Marxist term, here indicating
that the text reflects the original Dasein, mirroring and imitating it iconically;
(6) fragmentation, such that the modes of Being appear in signs and texts only
occasionally, incompletely, and fragmentarily; and (7) self-reflective, or arbitrary:
the text has no iconic or indexical relation to the original Dasein; rather, the rep-
resentation is entirely constructed and conventional (see Figure 3.3, p. 69).
If our subject is culture itself, then the essential matter is how it represents
to itself those various instances in its continuous process of development. Here
we recall Lotman’s famous declaration in his Thesis 9.0.2: “The central mech-
anism which combines various levels of culture and systems is the model of a
culture of itself, the myth of a culture of itself, which appears in a given phase
of it. It is realized in the manner in which a culture represents itself for itself . . .
and thus regulates actively the shaping of its own whole.” Both individuals and
entire cultures and communities make for themselves two types of representa-
tions; descriptive, which are intended for self-reflection, and prescriptive, which
are meant for action. For instance, the Bible, for a priest, may be a descriptive
representation of God’s announcements; whereas the handbook of a Mass serves
as a prescriptive representation of a religious ceremony. Physiologie du goût by
Brillat-Savarin is a descriptive representation of cooking, whereas Éloges de la
cuisine française by Édouard Nignon (1995) is partly prescriptive. Altogether, the
problem of representation is omnipresent, wherever a subject lives, moves, feels,
and reflects upon itself.
To return to where we began: Representation is certainly not in a crisis, in the
sense that, as a pertinent idea, it has become unnecessary. Rather, it covers more
and more subtle phenomena, and its purport is becoming richer and richer in the
present phase of neosemiotics, the phase in which we are now living.
a. S1
S2
M2
spherisation
M1
b. M1
M2 simultanisation
S2
S1
c 1.
M1 S1
localisation
S1 M2
M1 M2
c 2.
M1→M2→S2→S1 temporalisation
S2 S1
d.
Widerspiegelung
e.
M1 M2 fragmentation
S1 S2
f. autoriflessivo
arbitrarity
Figure 3.3: Different kinds of representation

Chapter 4
The concept of genre: In general and in music
4.1 A semiotic approach to genre in general . . .
The notion of genre (Gattung) belongs to the central vocabulary and concepts of
semiotics. Nevertheless, it is less than overwhelmingly present in encyclopaedias
and dictionaries of the discipline. One problem is that it easily blends together
with other terms such as discourse, type, function, class, style, text, form, and so
on. And in trying to define genre in semiotics, we naturally have to ask, Which
semiotics? There is not one semiotics, but as many as there are semioticians. In
fact, semiotics has so thoroughly infiltrated other fields that it is now articulated
by many other discourses and terminologies.
As we have noted, in the broadest sense semiotics consists of two parts: signi-
fication, the study of meaning, and communication, the study of the transmission
of messages and signs. Genres can “signify” as such: the receiver of the message
turns to the TV channel which offers the “genre” he wishes to consume, and which
as such already represents something to him, whatever the content of the program
might be – news, cinema, soap opera, conversation, concerts, weather, medical
program, ceremony, or detective story. A listener selects a concert to attend be-
cause he wants to hear a certain kind of music; one goes to the movies to see a
certain kind of film, say a “romantic comedy” or “thriller”. Used in this way, such
genre designations already provide material to be taken as significations.
In communication, genre involves structures which the sender and receiver
of a message have to accept mutually to some extent, if one wants to commu-
nicate anything. Hence genre is a super-code, or “overcode” in Umberto Eco’s
terms, whose rules an individual cannot decide upon alone. In Saussure’s clas-
sical distinction of langue/parole, genre no doubt belongs to the first mentioned
principle, which is essentially a collective agreement. When Eco in his early work
La struttura assente (1968) wrote about the “automatisms” of codes which guide
our speech and acts, he in fact portrayed one aspect of genre: “We have to ask
whether man is free to express what he really intends, or whether he is guided by
some code . . . correspondingly we can doubt that a sender of a message speaks
in reality under the influence of some code. The mechanisms and automatisms
of language force the speaker to say certain things and leave certain things un-
said . . . ” (Eco 1968 [1971]: 60). Hence what a speaker “means” belongs to the do-
main of signification, and how he says it belongs to communication. Genre as a
semiotic formation pertains to the latter, that is, to the social sphere.
To understand the birth of genre in a subject, we have to scrutinize how and

why one selects a genre, and likewise one’s efforts to change genre, to break its
norms – which often happens in the arts – and finally, how one completely aban-
dons a genre. Genre concerns all the social behaviors of man. The verstehende
Soziologie of Alfred Schütz and Thomas Luckmann comes close to the concept
of semiotic action. The authors distinguish the concepts of Verhalten (behavior),
Handeln (action), and Wirken (influence). Whether my conduct is an action, I
know best myself. On the other hand:
. . . my fellows, others, essentially determine – on the basis of socially objectified rules con-
cerning typical behavior and gathered in a social store of information – the manifested or
non-manifested goals of my action. . . . This causes my own conduct to be directed according
to a certain predetermined intention, which is the basic precondition of any communica-
tion. . . . On this basis we are also able to correct and improve our behavior, what is valuable
for the practices of our daily life.
(Schütz and Luckmann 1994: 18–19)
As semiotic subjects, we fit our behavior and expression into some genre in order
to crystallize our thoughts and emotions as members of a certain community and,
on the other hand, in order to please others. The semiotic basis of genre is thus
to be seen as an oscillation between our two principles of Moi and Soi, self and
society.
In the historical sense, definitions of genre appear either deductively, from
given theoretical assumptions, or inductively, by the gathering of various cases
of genre. For the latter, Ducrot and Todorov (1972: 196) recommend the concept
of “type” instead of genre. (This should not be confused with “type” in Peircean
semiotics, where it is identified with a particular category of signs from which one
may produce single signs, or “tokens”.) On the other hand, there have been many
semiotic attempts to define genre, each with its own model. Such attempts reveal
the extreme diversity of the phenomenon.
One starting-point of European semiotics was Russian Formalism in the early
twentieth century. When the latter was discovered in the west in the 1960s, from it
grew a particular sub-genre of semiotics: narratology. In fact, a good many genre
studies examine the various narrative devices and structures used by genres.
Vladimir Propp, in his landmark Morphology of the Folktale (1928), created a
structural definition for this genre of Russian folklore on the basis of textual
properties: a folktale consisted of 31 functions or actions whose order was always
the same, and which constituted a kind of ideal genre repertoire from which
particular folktales picked their own versions. No specific folktale was obliged
to fulfil all the functions. Greimas later completed Propp’s model by adding the
“actants” of a story, which he reduced to six ideal types: destinator and destinatee,
72 | 4 The concept of genre: In general and in music
subject and object, helper and opponent; this was called the “mythical actant
model”. This model was generalized in application to all stories, regardless of
their social contexts. As early as here we see the effort of semiotics to clarify the
(presumably) universal processes of meaning and communication, understood
as the production mechanisms behind specific semiotic entities. Most theories
aim to explain genre using this vocabulary and metalanguage.
Another Russian formalist, Mikhail Bakhtin, developed a genre theory whose
starting-point was communication, the speech act or act of utterance; it was
based on a dialogical principle, which he considered decisive. He believed that
no concept, or “ideologeme”, exists that did not first occur in a dialogue, as
enunciated by someone. In Finland, Erkki Peuranen studied the semiotics of so-
called “disputes” as the origin of Bakhtinian dialogism, these having taken place
in Nääveli in 1918. The idea of dialogism transforms various genres into dynamic
units, in the sense that the end result of a dialogue cannot be anticipated. The
starting point here is the notion of a speaking subject, which has tremendous
impact on our everyday life. At every step we can hear someone talking about
someone else. In colloquial speech, we mostly speak about what others speak.
When listening to fragments of dialogue on the street, in a crowd, in waiting
rooms and so on, one hears frequently repeated: “He said so and so, he spoke,
he stated. . . . Information is seldom conveyed directly, but always by a reference
to an indefinite general source: ‘I have heard . . . it is said . . . people think . . .
believe . . . .” (Bakhtin 1979: 158). These are primary speech genres, which Monika
Fludernik calls “natural narratology”; from them more complex types of genre are
launched, such as various species of literature. Altogether, the speech of others
was for Bakhtin the same as the “alien word”, authoritarian speech, which tries
to persuade us with its truthfulness. The authoritarian word demands that we
recognize and adopt it; it inserts itself, without regard for whether we consider
it innately convincing. The alien word comes to us as ready-made, pre-existent.
Bakhtin thus joins the concept of genre to the concept of power and ideologies:
someone has the power to determine the genre (ibid.: 162–163). From this de-
veloped the postcolonial theory of genre, in which the “dominant” subject dictates
to the “dominated” the rules of the genre, its langue (Tarasti 2000: 137–151). From
the notions of dominant/dominated came the idea of primary and secondary
genres, as seen in the Tartu-Moscow School’s (Yuri Lotman and others) notion of
primary and secondary modeling systems, which we have already mentioned.
What is crucial to communication is its persuasive, conative function, as an-
other formalist, Roman Jakobson, described it. Genres are necessary, and their
rules must be accepted if one wants to convince a destinatee and to insure his
understanding of a message. What is involved here is the credibility and truth
value of a discourse. In Germany, André Jolles elaborated his own theory of folk-
lore genres in the 1930s in his study Einfache Formen (1930). Legends, such as
biographies of saints, are incredible, doubtful, and in the end untrue, from the
viewpoint of history. In legends, which tell the story of an either extremely good
or extremely bad person, the miracle plays a central role. Correspondingly, other
genres, such as myth, fairy tale and saga (die Sage), differ from a history and thus,
according to Jacob Grimm, are untrue. In his Deutsche Mythologie (1835) Grimm
describes these genres:
History never repeats itself, but is everywhere fresh and new; a saga in turn is always re-
born . . . the winged saga rises and sinks, its remaining descent [obtains in the fact that it]
does not arrive in every nation. Where distant events have disappeared in the darkness of
time, there a saga joins itself to them . . . when a myth weakens and is going to dissolve, then
history rushes to help. But where myth and history encounter each other, there epos weaves
its texture . . . .
Basically, genres have to do with man’s desire for knowledge, his world view,
and his efforts to understand: a subject faces the world and asks, he demands,
that phenomena and the world become familiar to him. And he gets the answer:
namely, his own words. Myth and oracle belong together as a genre: they both
prophesy. Yet the spiritual activity of a myth has an authority, cogency, and in-
dependence different from those of legend and saga, and therefore as linguistic
expression has a coherence, competence, and authority higher than that of legend
and saga. The riddle-myth is an answer that includes a question that is hiding the
answer. In myth man asks about the quality of the world and phenomena, and the
world answers. In a riddle, man is asked the question, in order to determine if the
asked person possesses a certain value.
Accordingly, genres were articulated in archaic societies via certain functions
and means of sense production. Literary critic Northrop Frye developed a genre
theory that may be seen as a continuation of Jolles’s work and his definitions of
riddles. Narrative modes, in such genres as myth, which determine realistic stories
and comedy, are based on the relationship between a protagonist and a reader or
destinatee: if the characters in a story are on a higher level than we are, then myth
is involved. If they are on the same level, it is a realistic mode, and if they behave
worse than we do, then it is a comedic mode.
Genre thus emerges, in these theories, from the generally human processes
of signification and communication. By crossing different categories we get dif-
ferent definitions of genre, just as in Frye, where the mixing of categories intellec-
tual/personal intention and introvert/extrovert results in four cases: testimony,
romance, analysis, and novel. According to Todorov, genres emerge internally:
a literary genre is not born from reality but from literature itself. Poems can be
written only by its point of departure from other poems, literature from other lit-
erature (Todorov 1972: 14–15). Literature does not represent our everyday life but
rather itself, which unavoidably leads to a kind of tautology: literature signifies
only itself; that is, literature and poetry are languages of their own. Such a lan-
guage does not constitute any truth, but expresses several possible truths. Via the
concept of genre, a literary work is set into a relationship with all other literature
(ibid.: 12). This argument surely holds true for other arts as well: pictures emerge
from other pictures, music from other music¹.
Genre can thus be defined ontologically starting from the social functions and
historical situations that create and maintain them. Or nominalistically, we may
suppose genres to be like Wittgenstein’s language games, which grow and tumble
one into the next, like dominoes: Genre 1 = ABCD, genre 2 = BCDE, genre 3 = CDEF,
genre 4 = DEFG, where the first and last texts in this family relationship have no
common traits, but still develop from the same series. Such is how Danish literary
scholar Jørgen Dines Johansen advises examination of the concept of genre and
its transformations (Johansen 2002: 4). It is true that genres presuppose memory,
as collective memoranda of a culture (Asafiev).
Yet, Theodor Adorno, who always underlined the dialectical and negative as-
pect, states that art always tries to break free of the straightjacket of the generic,
and strive for the particular: “There is no aesthetic progress without oblivion;
every advancement also includes regression” (Adorno 2006: 404). Adorno inter-
prets art in relation to society and dares to utilize the concept of progress:
Art is in its innermost essence bound with the ever stronger historic movement of contrasts.
It has just as much or as little progress as society . . . since no progress has yet taken place in
the world, there has yet to be progress in art: il faut continuer . . . art remains totally blended
with what Hegel calls the world spirit . . . . Art works that dwell in brotherly union with the
world spirit are indebted to it for their breath, vitality, and everything by which they can
transgress the Always-the-same.
(ibid.: 401)
One might ask, then, Who determines which genres follow the movement of the
world spirit, and which do not? Adorno presupposes that the continuity of art
genres is based upon historic events and upon generic correspondences with
static social structures, which show the limitations of genre history. For with
abrupt structural changes, “as when the position of the bourgeois class ascended
1 The notion of music deriving from previous music should be distinguished from the case of
Musik über Musik, as in the manner of Igor Stravinsky’s parodies of earlier style periods; for
instance, in the “Devil’s Chorale” in L’histoire du soldat, which was commonly considered to be
“Bach harmonized with ‘wrong’ bass notes”.
in the nineteenth century, genres and styles change just as unexpectedly” (ibid.:
402). And yet, genres may obstinately continue to live through periods of crisis
(discussed below).
Adorno brings us to the crux of a central problem: the mutation of genres.
Almost all scholars nowadays emphasize this aspect of change, in contrast to the
normativity of genres. Adorno juxtaposes genre concepts with convention and
style. The nominalist school showed that all artistic genres and their demands
were set from the outside, hence fragile, dead, and formal. Nevertheless, con-
ventions become tempting when they lose their power, when they become play.
Conventions serve as masks when they become functionless, and masks are the
forefathers of art. Accordingly, Adorno on one hand connects art genres to so-
ciety, but on the other shows how genres detach themselves from its practices.
The advent of conventions-cum-formal principles fortified them internally and
made them resistant to imitating outer reality. The stronger a subject becomes,
and the weaker categories of social order get, the more difficult it is to reconcile
the relationship of subject and conventions. It is precisely this ever-growing gap
between inner and outer, the cleft between the Moi and the Soi, that leads to the
breakdown of conventions and, with that, to a change of genres.
In any case, the context of Adornian theory is the European society of
what I call the “sociosemiotic” phase – along with which the genre theory of
someone like Georges Dumézil, scholar of Indo-European mythology, already
seems outmoded. He posited three species of mythologies and actants: (1) amidst
the play of the gods: the warrior-hero; (2) amidst gods and demons: the shaman;
and (3) amidst the gods and men: the king.
Similarly, Claude Lévi-Strauss’s view of genre-shifts, even between cultures,
can be explained on the basis of his ontological structuralism. That is to say, cat-
egories of the human spirit are essentially the same in all ages and everywhere,
which explains for instance the fascinating thesis he proposes in the last volume
of his Mythologiques; namely, that South American Indians had for millennia used
the structure of a fugue, this particular “genre”, in their myths, even before it
was discovered in Europe. In the seventeenth century, when the Cartesian spirit
had expelled myth from science, one finds it did not become extinct at all; and
of course it could not become extinct, being a universal property of the human
mind – a Kantian “transcendental”; rather, its heritage was shared by two genres.
Literature inherited the content of myth, and hence the novel emerged². Music, on
2 Here Lévi-Strauss had in mind a novel like Don Quixote, but I would rather exemplify this with
a novel by Madeleine de Scudéry, written during the French Baroque period, namely her novel
Le Grand Cyrus, the longest novel ever written, amounting to some 10,000 pages – truly a never-
ending tale.
its part, inherited from myth its structure and so the fugue emerged as a particular
musical technique, which Adorno described in this way:
Fugue is an organizational form of completely rationalized and tonalized polyphony; in this

sense it extends as a form much further than its individual realizations, although it can-
not exist without them. Therefore emancipation from the scheme already has been written
universally in the concept of the scheme itself.
(Adorno 2006: 386–387)
Here Adorno adds to genre a new concept, namely genre as a “scheme”.

As did Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, in his structuralist period, touched on
the problem of genre in his work Les mots et les choses (Foucault 1970). As we
saw in the preceding chapter, his view was based on the idea of an epistemic,
archaeological level of culture, which determines the criteria of similarity and dif-
ference for each epoch. On this basis emerged an archaeology of knowledge about
genres such as grammar, natural history, economy, linguistics, philosophy, and
so forth. The subject for whom these genres represented Being was, however, still
invisible; according to Foucault he did not even exist two hundred years ago. The
natural sciences treated man as a genre. The semiotic subject is not the entity that
decides about genre; rather, genre occurs, takes place, is “generated”, in a kind of
internal and organic process of sense production. As Yuri Lotman argued, culture
is the generator of such “structurality”; genres are formations guaranteeing the
continuity of the universe of signs, or “semiosphere” in Lotman’s terms. Later,
Jaan Valsiner, in his book Culture in Minds and Societies, pondered varieties of
deductive, inductive, and abductive reasoning in the formation of social concepts
(Valsiner 2007: 279), and his results hold true also for the theory of genres.
Very close to such thoughts come theories that identify the concept of genre
with discourse (Morris 1971: 205). The best-known representative of this theory is
perhaps the American semiotician Charles Morris, who classified genres of dis-
course on the basis of their usage and modes; in use they were informative, evalu-
ative, incitive, and systemic; their modes were signifying, appreciative, prescript-
ive, and formative. He ended up with 16 different genres of discourse (see Fig-
ure 4.1).
Morris states that each of the 16 classes of discourse can be studied only by
scrutinizing documents and statements that are generally recognized as belong-
ing to each genre. Hence in Morris’s view, one needs to do empirical research
in poetry, fiction, law, religion and other languages. For instance, “religious dis-
course” is manifested in documents that some consider religious, but which do
not belong to the determinative, initiating genre of holy writ.
Like Morris, the Paris school of semiotics and its leader A. J. Greimas ap-
proached the concept of genre deductively. In his famous Sémiotique: Dictionnaire
Usage
informative valuative incitive systemic
Mode
designative scientific fictional judicial cosmological
appraisive mythic poetic moral critical
prescriptive technological political religious propagandist
logic-mathe-
formative retoric grammatical metaphysical
matical
Figure 4.1: Morris’s genres of discourse
raisonnée de la théorie du langage (Saussure and Courtés 1979: 164), Greimas gives
three definitions of genre. According to him, “genre” denotes a class of discourses
which can be identified by sociolectal criteria. These in turn are due to the implicit
classifications; in oral traditions these are based upon a particular categorization
of the world or “theory of genres”, which in many societies appears in the form
of explicit, essentially non-scientific classification. Such a genre theory, however,
has nothing to do with a typology of discourses like Morris’s, which is rather
based on the recognition of special formal features. Genre theory, for Greimas, is
obviously a cultural relativism and stems from hidden ideological presumptions.
For Greimas it proves interesting only if it reveals the concealed axiologies of a
culture. Doubtless just such genre research has been done in many domains of
the Paris school. On the other hand, in the context of European culture, modern
genre theory takes shape along the axis of two poles: (a) “classical” theory, which
is based upon the unscientific distinction between form and content in certain
literary discourses (comedy, tragedy, etc.); and (b) “postclassical” theory, which
consists of a certain vision of reality, of references whereby one can distinguish
various “possible worlds” that are more or less hidden narrative manifestations
of norms (e.g., fantastic or miraculous tales, surrealist stories, etc.). As the third
point Greimas says that the same cultural framework that produces literary genres
can also carry religious genres, among others.
Another dictionary following the Paris school is the Vocabulaire des études
sémiotiques et sémiologiques (Aldriss et al.: 2009). In it genre is viewed more as
a component than as an individual phenomenon; great discourses (literature,
philosophy, science, etc.) in general consist of various genres. Literary discourse
is compounded from genres such as the novel, short story, prose poem and so on,
and each of these can be further split into subgenres: travel log, detective story,
and so on. The author of the definition, Jean-François Bordron, interestingly states
that the understanding of a text cannot be separated from its placement in some
genre; genre forms the background out of which the specificity of a text emerges.
Genre can be taken as a set of complex norms that is renewed through history. To
write a novel means to write like writers of novels, where the mimetic aspect of
genre is central. These norms have to be distinguished from linguistic schemes,
just as they are from different uses of language. It would be erroneous to take
genres as perpetual entities.
In this definition genre thus appears akin to the Greimassian notion of isotopy.
Isotopy indicates that level of meaning of a text, or part thereof, which guarantees
that we can read it as a coherent whole. Isotopy is not so much an empirical as
a cognitive category, which enables us to grasp the profound meaning of a text.
The Belgian scholar Jean-Marie Klinkenberg states the same when he remarks that
we can directly classify phrases we encounter into different genres. For instance,
consider phrases such as “Il pleut à Paris”, “Il pleut dans mon cœur”, and “Put a
tiger in your tank”. We immediately notice that the former belongs to the genre
of reportage, the second to “poetry”, and the latter to the “advertisement” genre.
One can thus suppose that in a text representing a genre there must be some index
pointing to which generic isotopy it belongs. Naturally, the mere title of a work
evokes its genre. If the word “novel” appears on a book cover, the reader knows
what to expect; if on a musical score one reads the title “symphony” or “sonata”,
then a listener knows how to listen. A constant source of mistakes is the choice of
the wrong genre. For instance, in a social situation in which only politeness codes
rule, the truth code is suppressed. No one begins a dinner table conversation with,
“I heard your doctoral thesis was rejected” or “Your book received bad reviews”,
even if these things are true. Finally, we must remember that semiotic genre the-
ory does not only concern literary, visual, or auditive objects. Behaviors, too, are
“texts” that are classifiable into genres: seminars, interviews, coffee parties, cere-
monial speeches, lessons, meetings, musical performances, sporting events, and
many more.
The concept of genre undeniably has a normative dimension. The illustrious
aesthetician of the Prague school, Jan Mukařovský, considered genres above all
as meeting places of aesthetic norms. Genre represented for him the technical
norms of art-work production, by which he understood certain manners, petrified
residues of the long development of the arts; they stand, so to speak, in the lobby
through which one enters an art work. Conventions like poetic meters, musical
forms and the like were necessary norms when they developed, and they included
just certain regularities of genres (Mukařovský 1978: 53).
Even though genres are normative, they are also to a certain extent arbit-
rary. Philippe Lejeune (1975) has developed a theory of autobiographical contract
(pacte autobiographique). In studying autobiographies Lejeune noticed how such
texts operated on the basis of a kind of implicit agreement, which determined
who was to be the narrating ego. He gathered his results into a diagram, in which
Figure 4.2: Lejeune’s comparison of autobiography to general biography
the genre of autobiography is juxtaposed with the biographic genre in general

(Figure 4.2).
In addition to autobiography Lejeune advances the notion of a novelistic con-
tract, an important genre principle that (in addition to fictionality) requires that
the narration not be based upon identity; that is, the author and the main protag-
onist are different entities.
The issue of representation arises again, in that genres can imitate each other,
as did certain biographies of the eighteenth century that took intimate literary
genres as their models; for example, letters (Goethe’s Sufferings of Young Werther
or Senancour’s Obermann); memoirs and diaries (Bernanos’s Le journal d’un curé
de campagne). Lejeune’s theory may be generalized to include a contract of the
cinematic genre, a symphonic agreement (pacte symphonesque), and more. This
simply means that when an artist announces, for instance in a title, that a work
is a play, performance, or symphony, he is obliged to make good on his promise.
Yet the mixing of genres has become habitual in all the arts: as part of an opera
performance we may see videos; in music we have crossover phenomena among
genres and cultures, for instance between erudite and popular genres, of which
collage, among others, is a special form. Genres are no longer fixed codes but
dynamic processes in which everyone in a communicative act can participate.
Günther Kress (Kress & van Leeuwen 2001: 191) has emphasized that a genre cor-
responds to the changing social structures that it enacts. Genres carve out various
positions for those who participate in them – interviewer and the one interviewed,
for instance – which one may either accept or reject. This theory underlines that
a genre contract is only a modest proposal, the actual functions of which are
conditioned by all partners in a communication.
In current theories, particularly in the visual fields of cinema and TV, genre
operates primarily as a semiotic process of production. For instance, the film insti-
tution relies on genre as one of its main ingredients, its function being to regulate
production and consumption of movies. When a film, even as early the production
phase, is situated in a certain genre, this creates anticipations in the spectator.
Because cinematic genre types are based on production and consumption, it is
hard to find any common generic criteria for all of them.
In existential semiotic terms, a genre is a virtual pre-sign: a concept, model,
or type which is realized either well or badly in an act-sign, that is, in some text,
and which is then, as a post-sign, put by receivers into the correct genre. But this
“correct” genre need not necessarily be the same as the one as that of the virtual
idea as it awaits actualization.
Göran Sonesson ponders such issues in his book Bildbetydelser (1992), but
scarcely mentions the concept of genre. He speaks instead about images or pic-
tures, which are only one type of visual signification. For socially pertinent pic-
tures he distinguishes the following criteria, which constitute a kind of genre ana-
lysis in the visual domain: First is the principle of construction, how a pictorial
sign is built; for instance, those aspects that distinguish a photograph from a
painting. Then there is the socially intentional effect, impact or functions; these
are the effects which the picture is intended to have on a certain community. An
advertisement, for instance, is presumed to “sell”, a satire to poke fun, a docu-
mentary to provoke thought, and so forth. The social distribution channel dissem-
inates the picture in a society such that it reaches its intended receivers. For in-
stance, an advertisement differs from a newspaper picture; a landscape postcard
differs from a poster, and so on (Sonesson 1992: 266). Sonesson uses as an ex-
ample the classical analysis by Roland Barthes of a Panzani ad: it is a photograph
(principle of construction), which serves as an advertisement (socially intentional
effect), that occurs as a newspaper announcement (channel of distribution).
Roland Barthes traced the most varied behaviors and textual genres to one
archetype: the modern myth. Genre analysis thus involves the revelation of hid-
den ideology. In his famous inaugural lecture to the French Academy, Barthes
examined the normative character of language, which he provocatively declared
to be “fascist”, and from which the only escape was by literature, which as a
secondary language plays with and breaks the rules of genre.
Genre theories of the 1990s and 2000s start more and more from the view-
point of the consumer. The empirical material comes from the world of media
or multimedia, from advertising, TV or cinema. Paul Cobley (1996, 2002), for ex-
ample, argues that consumers know, at least roughly, what “genre” means, in
that they take it as a classification which determines whether some text corres-
ponds to their previous experience with similar texts. Genres in the marketing
world have received special attention by Italian semioticians, almost all of whom
seem to follow the methodology of the Paris school (except for Eco and Ponzio).
Gianfranco Marrone (2007), in his research on the semiotics of labels and brands,
views genres as based upon certain general impacts of sociability on our beha-
vior, production, and interpretation, whereas individuality is based upon style.
Brand names and other company emblems run by a system that exploits genres
of communication, as was said above in connection with Charles Morris. In Mar-
rone’s view, genres have long served as prescriptive rules, aesthetic norms from
which one can produce literary and artistic works and against which idealistic,
Romantic artists once struggled as limitations to their creative freedom (Marrone
2007: 183–184).
Gradually the descriptive perspective has come to predominate in anthro-
pology, linguistics, and aesthetics. From this angle, genre appears as a concept
which can be better interpreted, the more it stands out from other, similar phe-
nomena. Genre does not manifest via only one text. Rather seldom is some thriller,
sonnet, document, talk show, novel and so on defined as its own particular genre
only by virtue of its own contents. Most often it contains other texts – paratexts –
and the genres to which they in turn belong. Genre is therefore a non-empirical,
mediated reality, something translated and intertextual, and as such it is a de-
termining entity of human and social signification (ibid.: 183). Between text and
genre occurs a particular dialectics, since on the one hand every text becomes
interpreted and understood by a certain genre, and on the other hand, a text sim-
ultaneously renews, destroys, and creates that genre.
On this basis Marrone presents four genres of advertising as a semiotic
square. It originates from the two main ideologies of advertising distinguished
by J. M. Floch: referentiality, which foregrounds the inner substance of the pro-
ducer, or construction, which focuses on the destinator (utterer, producer) of the
ad. Advertising genres are thus referential, mythical, substantial, and indirect
(ibid.: 188). We should add that brand names and labels are kinds of “marked”
signs (Martinet), which arise out of a continuum of signs, the “semiosphere”
(Lotman), or out of some deep-level isotopy (Greimas). The very notion of “brand”
or “branding” brings with it such an identificational aspect. Cobley’s (ibid.)
theory of genre also deals with electronic media, but emphasizes the other side of
the equation, the receiver, thus emphasizing genre as a set of expectations rather
than a textual unit. Such analysis takes genres as part of the public sphere rather
than as textual phenomena.
From this it follows that generic features cannot be strict rules. In Rick Alt-
man’s (1999) theory of cinematic genres, they consist of “building blocks” on the
one hand, and on the other, of the structure into which they are inserted. Thus
we have semantics and syntax. On this ground one can map which textual field
the reader’s expectations can influence. Nevertheless, as a comment valid for all
genre theories this hypothesis remains incomplete, given that a genre employs all
semiotic mechanisms. Rather, genre is a dominant, a principle traversing all levels
of a text, as the Formalists defined it, or a “semantic gesture” as the Prague struc-
turalists claimed. If some case of genre consists of various discourses, then the
reader (listener, spectator) decides which of these to follow as a syntactic clue to
the work (Marrone 2007: 25). Narratological concepts help us to shape the reality
of genre. For instance, the real reader of a genre is not its “implied reader”, in other
words, the one which was in the mind of the producer of the genre. Also, some
cases of genre can open a new genre, in a kind of type/token relationship. For
instance, after Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony all the Allegro movements of sym-
phonies written in E flat major were heard in the atmosphere or Stimmung which it
created; hence E flat major emerged as a “heroic” key. Genre innovations can thus
be realized via individual creations. Even though a genre is bound to history by
its semantic blocks, it is likewise true that genres can survive even during great
periods of crisis, when, according to Asafiev, a culture’s store of “intonations”,
internalized musical “givens”, is forced to change.
The concept of genre can be located in a certain position in existential
semiotics, as one case of its modes of Being. These, as we know, produce four
cases: being-in-myself (an-mir-sein), being-for-myself (für-mich-sein), being-for-
oneself (für-sich-sein), and being-in-oneself (an-sich-sein). The M-cases (Moi)
on our Z-model, as elaborated in Chapter One, indicate the “Me”, as modes of
subjective being; the S-cases indicate “Society” (Soi). The Z-model, reproduced
in Figure 4.3, thus portrays individual and social aspects of the human mind,
especially how the social intrudes into man’s essence, and on the other hand,
how corporeality passes through even the most abstract norms and values of a
society. The cases correspond to the following phases of human development:
body as a chaotic, kinetic, energetic, and desiring entity; body as organized into
a person (identity). On the other hand, in the bottom right corner of the figure are
shown norms, ideas, values as abstract categories, and the values in question as
actualized into social practices and institutions. For reasons of economy I number
these phases M1, M2, M3, M4 and S1, S2, S3, S4.
The Z-model depicts two semiotic forces, one going from body to social norms,
and the other from social norms to body. Does this occur according to an “Ador-
nian” process, such that the body, step by step, becomes socialized as it passes
through these four cases? Or is society embodied, corporealized? Whatever the
case, it is clear where genres belong in this model: S2 (social practices). These are
encountered by, say, a painter, who from this meeting finds renewed inspiration
and resources for his actions. Genre is thus guided by these two forces, and since
it is situated at their crossing point, always a space of tension, its reality is always
moving and changing. This explains also the observation made as early as by
Tynianov (1924/1977: 235), that a genre shifts; not all forms or manifestations of
a genre can be covered by a single, static definition. Evolution takes place in a
4.2 . . . and in music | 83
Figure 4.3: The Z-model of Moi/Soi
broken, fragmented way, not in a direct line. Hence, as mentioned earlier, genre
is not a perpetual and immutable system.
4.2 . . . and in music
In music the concept of genre is more complicated than in all the other arts. Since
the musical reality itself is so diverse – both anthropologically, from culture to
culture, and historically, with respect to changes within a single culture – it seems
futile to try and put all definitions of musical genres into one theoretical model.
I borrow from ethnomusicology the terms “emic” and “etic”; the former describes
a culture’s internal ideas about itself, the latter, those characteristics of a cul-
ture as seen from the outside. From these we get two basic approaches to mu-
sical genres. The emic, or inner, way starts from a musical subject (composer,
performer, listener) and scrutinizes genre with respect to its participants in human
communication. The etic approach, in turn, examines musical phenomena so that
they can be classified, typified, and analyzed.
4.2.1 Before genres
Other theories study the states that come before the concept of genre, the grounds
on which genres originate. One such theory is that of the Czech musicologist
Vladimir Karbusický, concerning archetypes or Urformen, of which he distin-
guishes five: (1) endless production, repetition, impulsive variation; (2) additive-
tectonic devices, the building of musical space by addition; (3) cyclic “eternal”
return, circular movement, (4) departure-development-return; (5) four-part dram-
aturgy, as in cyclic sonata form, featuring the dialectical dramatization of devel-

opment (Karbusický 1992: 91). These are shown in Figure 4.4.
Class 4 is quite similar to many other foundations of musical form, such as
introductory, developing, and terminating “functions”; or as Boris Asafiev put it,
initium-motus-terminus in his intonation theory. In general narratology we have
the categories of virtuality – passage to act/non-passage to the act – achievement/
non-achievement (Brémond 1973); or inchoativity, durativity, terminativity (Grei-
mas and Courtés 1979: 22, 111, 185, 389).
The Italian semioticians Gino Stefani and Stefania Guerra Lisi, in turn, have
developed a theory of seven prenatal style features: (1) Concentric-pulsating
style, centering on one point, pulsation, vibration line, ostinato, drone, pro-
tomelody; as in Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata, Wagner’s Rhinegold overture, or
Ligeti’s Atmosphères. (2) Balancing, wave-like motion, swaying, rocking, tension-
relaxation, sliding and gliding, as in Bach’s C major Prelude from Das Wohltem-
perierte Klavier or Palestrina Masses. (3) Melodic, continuous movement, linear,
upward and downward, ease, happiness, tenderness, experience of flight, dream,
arabesque, legato, fluid-like “arch form”, cantabile phrasing, as in Bellini’s
Casta diva, Schumann’s Träumerei. (4) Turning, circular movement, pirouette,
circling, spiral, whirling, being swept away by passion, Viennese waltz, baroque:
elliptical, spiral orbits, poetics of wonder, astonishment, spiral staircases of
Bernini, Caravaggio, and Borromini. (5) Rhythmic-staccato, movement to and fro,
activation of the center, points, strokes, Schumann’s Rasch style (as Barthes called
it), African drumming, two-pulse musics, hymns, marches, tarantellas, samba,
tango, Berio’s Circles. (6) Image-Action, chaos, loss of control, anxiety, tendency to
trance, Scriabin’s music, Stravinsky’s Sacre, Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge.
(7) Cathartic: changes of stimuli, chaos of timbres, surprise, crescendo, acceler-
ation, intensification, vital forces, syncopated rhythmic style, arrival, Rossini’s
crescendos, ecstasy, catharsis of Beethoven’s symphonies. Stefani’s theory traces
kinetic states of music before the appearance of genres, and on this universal
basis can be shifted from one art to another. The theory uses the epistemic
level as the starting point, and its application to different arts – say, a principle
such as ornamentation, as in the Baroque style, which category also appears in
literary genres such as the novel, as well as in painting and in music. As Couperin
famously stated, “Nous écrivons différemment de ce que nous exécutons.”
The Swiss music psychologist Ernst Kurth believed European art music to
have two basic stylistic genres that preceded musical genres in the proper sense;
namely, polyphonic linear art and movement – as in Palestrina-type vocal works –
and classicism or corporeal, rhythmic style, which appears in marches, dances,
and melodies. If the first-mentioned was based upon transcendental movement
toward the heights, the latter was more earthly and based upon joi de vivre and
4.2 . . . and in music | 85
Figure 4.4: Karbusický’s urformen

bodily energy. Later, the American musicologist Leonard B. Meyer searched for
melodic archetypes looming behind formal and generic principles, such as tri-
adic, axis type, scale type, gap and fill, and more. In sum: musical genres in such
theories are articulated on an ontological foundation that already has its own or-
der and hierarchy, from which different genres then adopt categories and devices.
4.2.2 Major genre categories: Art music and popular music
Also problematic for attempts to define musical genre is that one can make both
broad generalizations and tiny distinctions within the framework of some formal
entities. For instance, we may speak about art and popular music, but also of
genres in between, which Carlos Vega (1967) calls “mesomusic”, referring to mu-
sic that is simultaneously both or neither, as is often the case in Latin American
music. We also find this, for instance, in the case of Viennese operetta and Span-
ish zarzuela. German musicologists created the category of Trivialmusik (Dahl-
haus 1973), in reference to music which, starting in the nineteenth century, served
purely social goals; for example, character pieces and dance tunes in salons. A
special subgenre of trivial music was a degraded genre of art music, whose criteria
were again inside the music. The criteria determining the distinction between
“artistic” and “popular” prove difficult to determine, because that distinction is
always to some extent ideological. Adherents of art music state that only art music
is multilevel, as is its basic Western manifestation in so-called Classical music and
style. The success of the Classical style, in the line of Haydn–Mozart–Beethoven,
relied however upon the sociological fact that it offered to all Viennese social
classes something of their own, something familiar to listen to. Popular cultural
elements became internalized in art music as particular “topics”, such as Länd-
lers, waltzes, musettes, hunting signals, folk tunes, and more. Popular music is
said to be based upon immediate sensual enjoyment, corporeality, music in which
the gestural has not been sublimated into expression. Ethnomusicologists in turn
claim that the internal quality and interiority attributed to art music is an illusory
category: all music is internal; musical experience is an experience plain and
simple, and different experiences cannot be set into any order of values. What
this involves is always a cultural distinction.
This dichotomy parallels the one outlined by Norbert Elias in his distinction
between “culture” and “civilization”. The former is the same as the German Geist,
Innigkeit, seriousness, the Sublime; and the latter is the material aspect of cul-
ture, enjoyment, sensual pleasure, Beauty, melody, cantabile, Italian and French
styles, popularity. Concerning modern society, Pierre Bourdieu created a theory
of simultaneous musical genres together with other “genres” of life style, where
4.2 . . . and in music | 87
the choice of music, like that of food, reveals the class to which one belongs. This
may hold true for traditional class society, as in Paris with its arrondissements, or
in youth cultures; but in the age of electronic communication, all musical genres
are available to everyone. Carl Dahlhaus has said that genre in music is always
linked with tradition. Tradition, in turn, functions most efficiently when its exist-
ence is not made conscious, when it unobtrusively guides man’s behavior. Living
tradition is invisible. Tradition, so to say, “offers” musical genres as something
ready-made. And yet, in the postmodern age people no longer live in a society of
one tradition, but of several and perhaps conflicting traditions. From this point
of view musical genres engage in a struggle for existence. Defenders of art music
have good reason to worry that the culture, behavior, and concepts which that
genre represents may be disappearing, or at least blending and mixing with genres
strongly favored by communications media. Gino Stefani, in his early theory of
musical competence, refers to the dichotomy of erudite/popular. The most import-
ant art music obtains at the level of individual opus or composition; in popular
music, anthropological codes and schemes are the most essential ingredients.
Dahlhaus (1973), too, says that in Western art music the meaning of genre dimin-
ishes radically from the nineteenth century on, with the individual art work dis-
tinguishing itself from others as the crucial point. Guido Adler called the extreme
case of this style-genre the “academic” style. The term “mediocre” was applied to
lower class music, unlike in the age of the Baroque or Classicism, when following
a genre type was more important than aesthetic novelty. Lieber langweilig aber
im Stil remained a principle in Germany, but in France Hector Berlioz wrote the
following in 1830, in his essay, Sur la musique classique et la musique romantique:
On a voulu très longtemps et quelques personnes voudraient encore retenir la symphonie dans
le cadre étroit qui lui fût tracé par Haydn. Mozart ne fit pas la moindre tentative pour en sortir.
C’était toujours, pour lui comme pour Haydn, le même plan, le même ordre d’idées, la même
succession d’impressions, toujours allegro suivi d’un andante, d’un menuet et d’un finale . . .
vif, et dans ces quatre mouvements jamais autre chose qu’un enchaînement plus ou moins
habilé de jolies phrases, de petites coquetteries mélodiques . . . ces compositions n’avaient pour
but que de divertir l’oreille . . . . Jamais on n’y remarque à moindre tendance vers cet ordre
d’idées qu’on appelle poétique . . . les compositeurs romantiques au contraire ont écrit sur leur
banniére: Inspiration libre, le prémier qui brisa les chaines scolastiques et s’affranchit du jeu
plus pesant encore de la routine fût Gluck. Il innova presque dans tout . . . .
(quoted in Condé 1981: 95–96)
(We have for a very long time wanted, and some people still do, to restrain the symphony
within the narrow framework which was traced by Haydn. Mozart did not make the slightest
attempt to escape. It was always for him and Haydn the same plan, the same ideas, the same
succession of impressions, always followed by an allegro, andante, a minuet and a lively
finale . . . and in four movements anything except a succession of more or less skilful pretty
phrases, small melodic flirtations . . . these compositions were intended only to entertain
the ear . . . . Never will one notice the trend we call poetic . . . Instead, Romantic composers
have written on their banner: “Free Inspiration!” Nevertheless the first to break the chains
of scholasticism and advance toward something beyond the routine, was Gluck. He was an
innovator in almost everything . . . .)
[Translation mine]
4.2.3 Norms and varieties of music
It is common for almost any musical phenomenon to be called a genre. One hears
of “genres” of piano music, wind music, string music and so on, referring to the
instrument(s) producing the music (the musical channels and Jakobson’s phatic
function). Yet, likewise there is talk about genres such as “sonata”, “symphony”,
“concerto”, “oratorio” and the like, when a category of musical form is taken in
mind. Also musical texture is experienced as a genre (e.g., fugue). Then we have
military music, church music, chamber music, advertising music, cinema music,
mood music – all of which function in primarily a social sense. The theory of
musical topics grows from this basis (Ratner, Monelle), such as the military and
pastoral entities stemming from those socially codified types of music. Altogether,
it is impossible to fix genre into a single musical category.
Many general genre-theoretical issues also apply to music, although in mu-
sicology they have not yet received much attention. As a normative scheme or
framework, genre is a mold into which a composer imparts his own musical ideas.
Genre is like a vow made by the composer, to which he refers in the title of his
work, and which in turn makes the listener expect something particular. A com-
poser may of course also break such a vow or play with it, but these attitudes are
negative sides of the primary, normative idea of a genre contract. Genres may die
by being forgotten, which Adorno mentions in his aesthetics; but they can also
emerge from an individual creation when a single work rises to such a significantly
normative position that is then imitated by all others. The normativity of genre can
ultimately be codified into rules so strict that they can be described by a generative
grammar, similar to how language is formalized into a grammar and inserted into
a computer. Musical rules, too, can be formalized for such purposes, and as we
know, such experiments are plentiful.
Finally, genres can also blend together, into fusions and crossover cases, as
we have seen. And genres can migrate, like the famous case of the chaconne,
stemming from the Mexican dance, chacona amulatada. We have also the case
of multiculturalism in music, leading to fascinating genre fusions, as in the case
of Ligeti and the Finnish avant-gardist Erik Bergman.
4.2 . . . and in music | 89
4.2.4 Genre in musical communication
In music, as in other sign systems and discourses, a subject wants to communic-

ate something to a community. A Moi aspires to touch the world of Soi (Tarasti
2005: 234–246). A composer wants to express some idea, create some signification
that he seeks to transmit. Music is the speech of one man to another, or as con-
ductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt calls it, Musik als Klangrede. The composer must
take into account the expectations of his public and use devices, structures, and
tools to convey those of his ideas which have also been mastered by his audience.
A composer must to some extent share the same codes as his listeners, and here
genre helps him. Genre crystallizes sociologically the anticipations of receivers
and consumers of a musical message; genres represent structures of communic-
ation, of langue, which a speaker must abide by if he wants to be understood
(Tarasti 1994: 16). Hence what is mediated to listeners are precisely musical signi-
fications.
Of course this semiotic theory can also be interpreted as a certain develop-
mental phase of Western erudite music, as Carl Dahlhaus presumes when he
speaks about musical genre and form. One may consider, for instance, sonata to
be something like an outer framework, a scheme into which the content is put in
order for it to appear. In this sense genre merges with norms:
Genre is a sub-concept of norms, and from norms one can make aesthetic judgments. The
work that neglects rules cannot manifest individuality either . . . . Art works came to be taken
as individuals, whose genre characteristics were secondary and aesthetically even negli-
gible. This view coincided with Romantic-genius aesthetics, which for originality and ex-
pression abandoned authoritarian norms and schemes as alien to real art. All this was based
upon a philosophy of art inherited from the eighteenth century, which claimed that con-
templation, plunging without concepts into the individual and particular, was the core of
aesthetics.
(Dahlhaus 1973: 889–890)
When Umberto Eco says that the aesthetic moment appears above all as a breaking
of norms, even here perhaps the Romantic model looms in the background.
In any case, in the light of our theory of Moi/Soi, an individual composer who
reaches out to the world of the Soi needs the help of genre to attain it. From the
viewpoint of Soi, genres render individual composers as raw material for the main-
tenance of a tradition. On the other hand, as Dahlhaus says: “Genre traditions
are at their strongest where they are unconscious, and belong to those conditions
which are set for music, instead of developing by themselves from it. Tradition
is – to summarize – that which is understood from itself” (ibid.: 891). From this
Hegelian point of view, then, composers are victims of a cunning historical in-
tellect, where genres exist to recruit them as agents of music history. Yet Adorno
emphasized that Moi is always in contradiction with society; and it had to be,
since for him progressive music lived in the conflict and constant negation of
tradition. He accuses Wagner of school-like four part harmony and Beethoven of
inappropriate “gesturality” in the pompous second theme of the slow movement
of the Fifth Symphony. Genre deeply impacts musical structures and principles.
As noted above, Ernst Kurth saw two great manifestations of the Classical style in
the history of Western art music; the first, polyphonic linear art, the second, lied,
march and dance tunes of the Viennese classical period:
Classical style was prepared historically by the growing penetration of folk and dance ele-
ments into music. Just as the lied-like classical form principle was based upon dance, so the
polyphonic line was historically reduced into the chorale and most closely to the Protestant
chorale, the artistic nature of which pervades the polyphony of Bach’s music. Yet the linear
form principle goes still further back, into Gregorian chant, accordingly to the time when no
external meters dominated.
(Kurth 1922: 9)
With this last statement Kurth means lied-like, symmetrical, periodic phrases,
in groups of 2 + 2, 2 + 2; whereas linear polyphony constituted a continuous
line. In other words, principles of musical formation emerged precisely from
the penetration of certain genres – chorale, Gregorian chant, and dance – into
general musical consciousness. This process can be well illustrated by J. S. Bach’s
and G. Fr. Handel’s instrumental works. For instance, The Well-Tempered Clavier,
Book I: D major prelude, essentially a French ouverture (opera in clavichord
music); G minor prelude: vocal techniques and dotted rhythms; E flat major
prelude: linear, Gregorian chant; F minor fugue: theme as chorale; Prelude to
the G major partita: orchestral effects, basso continuo; Gigue as fugue; etc. And in
Handel: F minor fugue, the outburst of bel canto melodiousness; D minor prelude:
pure linearity, with no bar lines!
4.2.5 Transgressing genres
On the other hand, a musical work of art can exceed its borderlines; a composition
may start from a genre type, then transcend it. This takes place in almost all great
art. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion can be taken as the climax of functional music of
its time; that is to say, of the Protestant chorale, polyphony, and counterpoint,
as well as of Baroque opera, with its arias, recitatives, and orchestral ritornellos –
the Passion brings to completion and surpasses all of these. It is the same with the
Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, which blends various arts together and produces
something more than mere opera. Therefore Wagner called his last work, Parsifal,
4.2 . . . and in music | 91
by the genre title Bühnenweihfestspiel, where a single art work became a genre
of its own, itself being the only exemplification of that genre. A genre tradition
culminates in works that form their own genre. In this sense genres can serve
as utopias. Granted, a genre must have an audience to receive it with their ex-
pectations; nevertheless, some musical compositions create their own audiences.
According to Marcel Proust, the late string quartets of Beethoven are such works.
And Alexander Scriabin, in his last phase, ended up with a new art form which
he called an acte préalable, an almost untranslatable term meaning an act prior
to the formation of a contract or promise, i.e., genre. For him this meant a thing
of mystery, a work that had to include tones, colors, dance, choirs, perfumes,
and which could only be realized in India. This was of course a post-Wagnerian
dream, and yet the whole aesthetics of avant-garde music is based to a large extent
precisely upon such a view of genre as a utopia.
4.2.6 Crises of genres
Genres can of course emerge from previous genres, but likewise they can originate
when changes in a culture’s intonations occur, when old intonations no longer
correspond to the emotional moods of new periods, that is to say, when genres
fall into crisis. When Pierre Boulez first struck out at opera as a genre, he proposed
that opera houses be burnt. Genre can thus be experienced as a harmful obstacle,
something we must get rid of in the name of progress. And yet, genres persist
as a challenge to composers, as a kind of world of ideals and norms which they
strive for in order to gain acceptance by their community. Genres come to act as
a kind of sanctified code, which cannot be changed. Whoever intervenes in the
codes of this genre must fall outside the community, as has in fact happened in
some countries. Take Sibelius for instance, who sought only to renew the genre
of the symphony, but whose “profound musical logic” Adorno, the norm-giver of
the German musical world, could not understand, neither aesthetically nor music-
theoretically. Instead, Sibelius’s gradual processes of change came to be accepted
as a precursor of minimalism! This shows that an earlier misunderstood work can
suddenly become acceptable to a new musical genre and conceived as a pioneer
of the latter. For instance, the symphony is still, even after Sibelius, a genre for
which almost all composers in Finnish music culture aspire; to write effectively in
this genre has become a rite of initiation, the proof of being a true composer.
Accordingly, composers are born in a certain culture and environment and
must live under its norms. But this does not change the principal fact that genres
are constructs and ultimately choices and commitments of composers. As a
bundle of norms, genre represents the “necessity” of the musical communication;
as a choice, they constitute “freedom”. There are also composers who change
their communities and, like chameleons, adapt to the social orders of different
contexts. Igor Stravinsky became a model example of the nomadic composer
identity. He launched his career in turn of the century Russia when, thanks to
Diaghilev, ballet was the central genre. For this Stravinsky created the Firebird,
Petrushka, and Rite of Spring. Then he moved to Switzerland and France, where
he wrote completely new chamber music genres for small ensembles. Finally he
moved to the USA, and again adapted to new markets and genres.
4.2.7 Cultural reflections
An interesting phenomenon is why certain musical genres are so strongly rooted

in certain cultures, while alien to others. According to the German view, in
European erudite music there are two main genres. The first is German in-
strumental music, so-called “absolute music”, with the symphony its highest
manifestation. On the other hand, there is Italian vocal art with all its mani-
festations, beginning from bel canto and its arch-genre and culmination, opera.
Alles Andere bleibt am Rande (Everything else remains on the periphery), as Hans
Georg Eggebrecht claims in his history of Western music.
With the possible exception of Martucci, Italian composers did not write
many symphonies. Similarly, in France symphonies have been avoided, being
considered too Nordic and heavy. There the most important genres have been
ballet, opera, and mélodie. Genres are thus also entities of discoursive power; to
define a genre, to teach it, to adopt it – all this constitutes the use of power. Who
has the right to change a genre? Do genres have a center and periphery? In the
market economy they serve also as economic powers. In copyright offices, which
secure reimbursements, one criterion for the price of music is precisely its genre,
because various genres are accorded different values.
All musical genres live via time, place, and actors, even though they are in
a constant historic process of change, developing on the one hand according to
their own laws, and on the other hand according to their functions in a society.
Genres are cultural units linked with certain places and functions: church music
is listened to in a church, military music in a parade, chamber music at home, and
so on. Finally, it comes down to individuals, who either have certain genres thrust
upon them, or choose genres for themselves. Musicians have their own special
genres, those in which their person and style, their Moi, are best displayed. Italian
bel canto tenors are not perhaps very good at performing Wagner; Glenn Gould is
splendid at playing Bach, but out of his comfort zone when performing Romantic
music.
4.2 . . . and in music | 93
4.2.8 Classics
One has to ask also if there are such things as national music genres. The question
can be formulated this way: Can universal music be national? Rising to this chal-
lenge, the German musicologist Hermann Danuser edited an anthology whose
title alone is revealing: Gattungen der Musik und Ihre Klassiker (Danuser 1988).
In this work he chooses certain genres of art music and for each genre indicates
its “classic” representative; in this context, the term “classic” means exemplary
or ideal. Any artist whose work ranks among the top achievements in his art may
be called “classical” (ibid.: 13). In defining central musical genres, Danuser de-
fers to Ludwig Finscher, a specialist in string quartet literature. Finscher, in turn,
argues that in all of the central musical genres – from Gregorian chant to sym-
phony – classicality appears as an evaluative norm. By their essence and structure
they have become highly differentiated and manifest themselves as exemplary,
and moreover have enough historical longevity to have reached maturity. Danuser
categorizes art music as represented by its most central genres and composers
(Figure 4.5).
Catholic church music Palestrina

Evangelical church music I Schütz
Evangelical church music II J. S. Bach
Oratorio Handel
Musical tragedy Gluck
Musical comedy Mozart
Solo concerto Mozart
String quartet Haydn
Piano sonata Beethoven
Symphony Beethoven
Lied Schubert
Lyrical piano piece Schumann
Music drama Wagner
Figure 4.5: Danuser’s list of central genres and their representative composers
4.2.9 National versus universal
It is a striking fact that “opera” is not listed among the genres in Danuser’s list –
perhaps because it would require considering the role of Italian opera, which is
avoided, as is the symphonic poem. Danuser admits that the national dimension
of classicality is of great importance, but that great difficulties present themselves
in dealing with it. The problem lies in the relationship of the national (as in Italian
opera and symphonic poem) to the universal. He is aware of the Germano-centri-
cism of the list and admits that one might ask, Why Schütz and not Monteverdi?
Why Gluck and not Rameau? Why Schumann and not Chopin? Yet he says that na-
tionalities foreground composers who have national meaning, but carry no weight
outside their nation (Danuser 1988: 14). On the other hand, all nations have, not-
withstanding chauvinist emphases, their own value and legitimacy without any
hierarchies. Hence one could justifiably take Chopin as the classic of the lyrical
piano piece. Still, we may ask how the national be pondered in respect of clas-
sicality. Is the “national” an advantage or disadvantage? Danuser omits telling
the reader that his entire reasoning starts from the hypothesis that, on the one
hand, there is Music which is universal – all of whose representatives happen to
be German – and on the other, music that is “national”. This would mean that his
“classic” composers, in addition to being German, are automatically universal as
well. This calls to mind a cartoon in which a Swede under a starry sky says, “Isn’t it
wonderful that we Swedes are the only people who are not foreigners!” Or the fact
that in Russian conservatories and universities, music history has been divided
into two classes: “Music History” (= Russian music) and “Foreign Music History”
(= Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and all the rest).
Do distinctly national musical genres exist? From the moment the national
category became a significant cultural element, they most surely do. Chopin wrote
mazurkas and polonaises, but in his piano works they are no longer the dances
of Polish folklore; in 1839 he wrote to his parents from Paris, remarking that no
one could actually dance to them. In his late mature works, such as the F minor
Ballade, G minor Fantasy, and Fantasy-Polonaise, Chopin created a synthetic style
characterized by the blending together of these genres. For instance, in the in-
troduction to the Andante spianato there suddenly occurs the reminiscence of a
mazurka and the accent typical of Kujawiak dance (accent on the second beat of
the bar). Chopin also transferred genre features of Italian bel canto to his piano
music, for instance in his Nocturnes and Études. He did not move scenes from
Bellini’s operas directly into his piano pieces, but rather imitated generic traits
of bel canto. Many composers conceived as national did the same. That is to say,
they did not directly quote folk music, but mimicked the features of folk genres in a
deeper and less recognizable manner. From Hungarian folk music Bartók adopted
the style of parlando rubato. Dvořák wrote instrumental “dumkas”. Latin Amer-
ican music is filled with new, folk-based musical genres, such as the Choros by
Heitor Villa-Lobos (a musical genre played by street musicians of Rio de Janeiro)
and more. In all these cases, the original folk genres are transcended, which res-
ults in a new genre that goes beyond the previous ones. What from a European
4.2 . . . and in music | 95
viewpoint is “exotic” is, to these composers, completely natural – as natural as

the four-part choral Satz is for Germans.
4.2.10 Social classification and functions
The concept of genre in music can also serve as a criterion of classification. For
instance, the aforementioned category of “classical music” may emerge originally
from a certain historical style or genre. Viennese classicism expanded to cover also
the Baroque and Renaissance, and was provided with the aesthetic evaluation
that, in it, form and content coincided, whereas in Romanticism the content de-
termined the form. When canonized, the classical style started to cover the entire
field of Western art music, and came to receive even more universal definitions,
such that it was music that all people in the world wanted to hear and perform,
again and again, from China and Korea to Venezuela. Ultimately, the generic label
of “classical” has come to cover all the art music available on recordings. Even
radically new music, which denies the pertinence of such labels, falls into this
category and ends up on the “classical” shelves of every music store.
The concept of genre has become more and more viewed as a sociological
entity corresponding to developments in other fields and other arts. This con-
cern with commercial and social conditions of production was manifested early
on. As said above, there emerged a particular genre in bourgeois music culture
which Germans called Trivialmusik. In the broad sense this referred to everyday
music which was played on social occasions, at home or for public entertain-
ment. It comes close to the concept of musical kitsch, denoting inauthentic pathos,
sentimentality without a musical basis. Dahlhaus’s example of kitsch is the horn
melody from the Andante cantabile of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony: a tension
occurs on the dominant-seventh chord and its resolution into tonic, but this self-
evident event is made “tragic” and its impact is banal. Here one might ask, Why
then are the huge dominant-seventh formations of Bruckner’s symphonies not
kitsch? For Vladimir Jankélévitch, a French music philosopher, Sibelius’s Pelléas
was shallow “casino” music (1992). For Adorno, Sibelius’s references to folk mu-
sic indicated helplessness, but quite similar devices in Mahler were “progressive
representations” of the voice of the suppressed classes. Genre terms are there-
fore used in music criticism, but often in a hypocritical manner. Subjective aes-
thetic judgments and propagandizing ideologies often wear the garb of genre con-
cepts.
4.2.10.1 Piano music as the genre of women

The development of piano music serves well as an example of the close connection
between social context and its inherent values. The expansion of the piano in
European cultural history coincides with the growth of the bourgeois class. Unlike
the nobility, the bourgeoisie could not afford to hire musicians and orchestras;
thus, home music was essentially chamber music. What had not been written for
piano was arranged for it, and new subgenres emerged; for example, four-hand
versions of symphonies, piano scores of operas, and the like. The practice of ar-
ranging grew out of salon music, which was defined by Robert Schumann in 1840
such that it referred to the place of music-making, and not to its musical genre. The
piano symbolically represented the power of the modern bourgeois class, and was
at the same time an industrial product and an elegant home furnishing. Since the
salon was the realm of women, while the men were influential outside the home,
piano music was written precisely for women. Carl Czerny said in 1842 that the
piano was particularly suitable for the more beautiful gender. Woman at the piano
became the center of family and social life. Young girls of all social classes received
piano lessons. In America, such a person was called a “piano girl”. It was clear
that these social conditions also influenced the genre itself: piano music. The most
popular piece in the nineteenth century was the Prayer of the Maiden by Tekla
Bądarzewska, which appeared in Warsaw in 1856. It consisted of only two pages
of music, only one motif, no development, clear harmonic cadences, figurations
and crossing of hands, all of which gave the impression of virtuosity, when it was
in fact a simple texture. All this was later considered by “feminist musicology” as a
type of gendered musical genre. The musical genre-representation of women was
therefore the lyrical character piece for piano, an arbitrary structure that could
easily have been defined differently in another social context. Yet this rule of the
supposed “femininity” of women’s music has brilliant exceptions, such as Fanny
Hensel, Teresa Carreño (the Venezuelan piano virtuoso), and Clara Schumann,
who enjoyed success in writing “male” genres and playing outside the home, on
public concert stages.
Correspondingly, the lyrical character piece started to lose its signification
when record players and radios replaced the piano; it was then that the piano
and piano music as a particularly feminine genre of expression lost its meaning.
Altogether, this shows the close connection between musical genres and changes
in their social functions. Modern computer technology has enabled quite new
musical genres and revolutionized in general the social role of composers, since
the tools of composing are available to all. A similar case of genre transformation
was the melodrama, widely popular in early Romanticism; called declamatorium
(recitations accompanied by music), the genre was used by Mozart, Beethoven,
Carl Maria von Weber, and in Finland by Friedrich Pacius (e.g., in his Die Weihe der
4.2 . . . and in music | 97
Töne). It disappeared as a genre, then was reborn as non-diegetic cinema music,

that is, music not part of the plot itself. What else is cinema music, playing behind
actors who are speaking on screen, if not a subgenre of melodrama?
4.2.11 Genre as classification
Wolfgang Marx, in his extensive study Klassifikation und Gattungsbegriff in der

Musikwissenchaft (2004), approaches the concept of genre above all as a prin-
ciple of classification, whereby we can conceptualize the course of music history
and its various cases. Alongside “genre” appear many other concepts, such as
type, group, class, category, form, style, genus, species. Friedrich Blume stressed
that concepts like genre, style, and form are very close to each other. In fact, in
the first edition of Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, the word Gattung (genre)
does not appear at all, any observations about it being made with regard to the
word “form”. Similarly, Walter Wiora sought to distinguish genre history from the
analysis of form. The characteristics of genre can vary greatly according to vari-
ous criteria, to which belong social context or function, formal structure (sonata,
rondo, etc.), and performance forces (orchestral, piano, woodwinds, choral, etc.).
Still, the concept of genre serves as a classificatory criterion, almost as in bio-
logy where one classifies animal or plant species. Therefore the genre “art music”
can be further classified: secular vs. sacred (where secular music = instrumental
music), vocal music vs. instrumental music, and so on. However, the difference
between this and natural-science classification lies in the fact that for music there
are no universally valid criteria for classification.
A problem of its own is the understanding of genres either by the model of an
organism or that of development. Genre, understood as an organism, causes us
to think of it has having a birth, climax, and decline or disappearance. According
to the development model, genre likewise has its emergent moment, continuous
change of horizon, then vanishing or blending together with other genres. Genre
has also been scrutinized as an ontological entity where, according to Dahlhaus,
some are inclined to idealize it in the Platonic tradition, the opposing view being
either realist or nominalist. Historians and sociologists find metaphysical genre
theories strange, although the concept of genre is itself an abstraction, in our
terms, a transcendental unit.
Genre also plays into the field of aesthetics, in which one may distinguish four
periods: (1) speculative music theory until 1300, where we have genres like musica
naturalis or artificialis, and in the first case, musica mundana and musica humana;
(2) the period of composed music, c. 1300–1800; (3) the period of art music, be-
ginning from 1800; (4) modern times, when all sounding forms are accepted as
music: art music, popular music, and folk music. In Athanasius Kircher’s Musur-
gia universalis (1650) the classification of music is extremely diverse, even absurd
to contemporary minds. In the mid-eighteenth century the so-called aesthetics of
autonomy was born, which viewed art music as completely detached from every-
day life. The musical work was conceived as the entirely unique creation of a
composer, and one which followed its own rules. In the Romantic period, to follow
the rules of genre was a sign of mediocrity.
4.2.12 Recent theories
Newer genre theoreticians have rejected many theses and assumptions of the Ger-
man Gattung theory. Chopin scholar Jeffrey Kallberg has studied the rhetorics of
genre. Kallberg denies Dahlhaus’s normative view of genre, and particularly the
notion that, from about the year 1830 on, genre lost its meaning, because compos-
itions had to be unique and individual masterworks. When the function of mu-
sic changed to an autonomy aesthetics, Dahlhaus presumes that communication
between composer and listener weakened. Semiotically speaking, this means that
if genre terms are structures of communication, as I claim above, then composers
would have had less need for them from that moment on. According to Kallberg,
the Romantics’ emphasis on individuality was rather a counter-reaction to the
normative view of what was then Neoclassicism. When the Romantics stressed
individuality, they did not at all abandon the universal value of art. Yet when we
arrive at the twentieth century, genre comes to be identified, says Dahlhaus, with
the title of the work. But this claim cannot be supported. After all, when com-
posers call their works Prisms, Figures, Structures, Transformations, and such,
these titles do not make the genre disappear. Worse is that Dahlhaus neglects the
communicational and persuasive value of genres. Genre is for Kallberg a persuas-
ive force that guides the listener’s response. The choice of genre and its recogni-
tion constitute the framework for musical communication. A kind of genre agree-
ment occurs between composer and listener. As we have repeated several times:
The composer agrees to use certain forms, shapes, and gestures, and the listener
agrees to interpret the work in this context. Agreements can be broken, however,
or simply misunderstood, as occurs with marginal works. Counter-genres or anti-
genres emerge, including synthetic genres (like Chopin’s late works) and at the
extreme such counter-genres as John Cage’s 4󸀠 33󸀠󸀠 which defies all generic ex-
pectations. In a word, genre serves as a rhetorical technique. It aids in making
an impact upon the listener.
Jim Samson, along the same lines, speaks about genre markers in a compos-
ition. For him genre is the most powerful code binding composer and listener.
4.2 . . . and in music | 99
Works often have a “host genre” and “visiting genres”. These may constitute a
“counterpoint” of genres, or one of them may control the other(s). Another well-
known theoretician, Franco Fabbri (1973), views genres as does Eco, as “cultural
units”. He does not accept the archetype theory of genre, according to which they
are determined outside of time and place. Rather, he views genre as set of mu-
sical events, real or possible, the course of which is determined by societal rules,
demands, and tastes. Fabbri allows that by means of genre we can understand
musical events, but above all we can talk about them. In other words, genres
pertain to the meta-linguistic aspect of music.
In sum, we would do well to recall that nowadays genres have to do mostly
with the receiver (consumer). The unrestrained capitalism of the “global” eco-
nomy sees to that genre, along with many other of what we would call transcend-
ental entities, becomes a commodity, one that feeds the tastes and desires of the
largest world-markets possible. Setting aside such issues as sales and consump-
tion, in the next chapter I address the issue of globality from a different perspect-
ive, with some thoughts on the world and how it has come to be interpreted.
Chapter 5
The world and its interpretation
5.1 World and worlds
Thinkers have devised various theories not only about the world, but about
“worlds”, be they Popper’s “three world entities”, theories of “possible worlds”,
and others. All of these involve semiotics, which, operative in the given world,
should also prove pertinent to possible, impossible, and totally transcendental
worlds.
It becomes fashionable to ponder “world views” from time to time, discussed
as early as in Karl Jaspers’s Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (1919). Most re-
cently on the topic we have Anne Cauquelin’s book, À l’angle des mondes possibles
(2010). Cauquelin, editor-in-chief of the journal Nouvelle revue d’esthétique, starts
with Aristotle’s claim that everything centers around the earth (Terra), which cir-
culates around fire, together with nine other planets. So that the “perfect” number
ten would be filled, the ancient Greeks imagined that there was also an invisible
anti-earth (Anti-Terra). In doing so, they were already postulating the logical or
semiotic structure of S and non-S (here, S does not refer to Soi, but simply to logical
positions). Aristotle further argued for a virtual existence before action (dunamis),
which was transformed into entelechy or actualization. Similarly, if one wants to
move (kinesis), one must have the potentiality (energeia) to do so. For both subject
and material to be able to act, they need potentiality. The potentiality of stone
might be to become a wall, but a sculptor can make a statue of it.
Leibniz defined this virtuality as a “monad”, a self-contained, self-maintain-
ing entity. From this it was a small step to the idea that we live in only one world. To
this vision Cauquelin adds one more element: fiction. Through art and poetry we
can imagine possible worlds. For instance, a novel creates a world, which is not
quite the same as our real world, but close enough so that we can identify with it.
Aesthetics is a way in which we can penetrate into possible worlds. Cauquelin’s
crucial thesis is that of the plurality of worlds. The earth on which we live is a
place from which we can depart for other territories, even to “extra-territories”, as
Adorno reasoned.
To Cauquelin’s mind, both “semiologists” and analytic philosophers conceive
the opening and unfolding of the world as occurring horizontally, in linear fash-
ion, whereas in phenomenology it is understood vertically, in depth. Just as vertic-
ality exists in the visible world, so does it also in the invisible one. In our opening
chapter, we argued that transcendence opens precisely into this invisible, vertical
nothingness. Heidegger, too, spoke of the opening of the ground, of depth. Hence
Cauquelin is certain that transcendence exists in art. From this we arrive at Eco’s
concept of the “open work”, from there to ontologies, and finally to Being in the
“second life” as avatars.
We may end our introduction with the notion of utopia, that Baconian world
that does not exist, and to Ernst Bloch’s principle of “hope”. What is involved here
is the category of noch nicht, not yet . . . but perhaps in the future. Its opposite cat-
egory is the loss of the hope: . . . auch ich war einmal . . . even I was once hopeful,
but after many unfruitful years, I abandoned hope. It is easy to see how, without
hope, one can easily develop a cynical view of the world.
We have seen, even in this brief introduction, great diversity in thought about
“worlds”. In what follows I look at some world-views more closely, grouping them
under the categories of philosophers, artists, and semioticians.
5.1.1 Philosophers
First is the little-known Avicenna (Ibn-Sina), a Persian philosopher, medical doc-

tor, logician, psychologist, theologian and poet, who lived in c. 980–1037. A child
prodigy, as his autobiography testifies, he went on to write about his world and
about how one became a scholar. What was needed were good libraries and the
ability to remember by heart. At the age of only ten years, he had already read
the Qur’an and much other literature. He proved to be much more skilful than his
teachers and also became familiar with logic and law, as well as with the math-
ematical and natural sciences of Euclid and Ptolemy. He wrote books about the
physical sciences and metaphysics, and then about medicine, which he studied
empirically by visiting sick people. At the age of sixteen he declared, “During
all that time I never slept a night, and all my days I spent in studies. I made
notebooks for myself, in which I gathered all the premises into classes with their
syllogisms. I would long ponder the premises of each problem until the issue
became clear to me (quoted in Avicenna & al-Ghazali 2001: 22). Avicenna then
took on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, “without, however, understanding its contents”.
Altogether, he read the book forty times and memorized all of its contents. As
an adult Avicenna spent a migratory life visiting various courts, and was even
appointed to high state posts. His pupil Abu Ubaid continued his biography and
assembled, among other things, a catalogue of Avicenna’s works. Avicenna went
on to become one of the most important scholars to mediate the heritage of ancient
philosophy to Europe.
Some thought-experiments by Avicenna in psychology, metaphysics, and lo-
gic have had longstanding impact on European philosophy. The best-known of
these experiments is his proof of the existence of the soul:
102 | 5 The world and its interpretation
When you are in good health, or rather in a normal state, such that you can comprehend
matters properly, are you ever forgetful of your own existence . . . ? . . . then imagine that you
are suspended in space for an instant, in such a way that you do not see the parts of your
body, and the members of it do not touch one another, you will find that you are unaware
of everything about yourself except the fact that you are – that you exist. With what do you
perceive yourself in such a state, or before or after it?
(Quoted in Afnan 1958: 150)
Thereafter Avicenna reasons that the answer is not the body, nor any sense organ:
“So what you perceive is something other than these things which you do not
perceive while you are perceiving yourself . . . . Thus that self which you perceive
does not belong to the order of things that you perceive through the senses in
any way whatsoever, or through what resembles the senses” (ibid.). Neither do
I perceive it by my action, since floating in such a state one is separated from one’s
acts. Such an act should thus have an absolute agent. It is easy to see how this idea
of Avicenna was duplicated many philosophers later, among them St. Augustine,
and particularly Descartes with his principle of cogito ergo sum.
Persian thought, one of Avicenna’s influences, contains the core of the Indo-
European world view, namely the dualist principle, especially the division of
the world into Good and Evil; for example, Zoroaster separated Ahuramazda,
the good god, from Ahriman, the evil one. At the same time, east of Persia
another type of thinking prevailed, which in contrast emphasized unity. Hence
the visions of Avicenna are central if we wish to understand more about the birth
of our European heritage. His famous poem on the soul displays the same vision
as above, only in fictional form. Avicenna portrays the soul as a bird that has
been imprisoned in a cage in the world. It remembers its previous situation, and
wonders why it had to come here down: “Out of her lofty home she hath come
down / upon thee, this white dove in all the pride / Of her reluctant beauty . . .
unwillingly she came”. Then Avicenna asks in the poem: “Why then was she
cast down from her high peak/to this degrading depth?” This happened “. . . for
a purpose wise, that is concealed / E’en from the keenest mind and liveliest
wit”. But when the time arrives she is ready to return. We may thus say that
Avicenna portrays the journey of the soul from transcendence to Dasein, and
back to transcendence.
All classical philosophers over the centuries have conceived of their own
“worlds”. We have already mentioned one of the best-known of these, Leibniz,
who spoke about windowless monads, which function together because God has
set them into an harmonia praestabilita, a pre-established harmony. Leibniz’s
idea that we are living in the best possible world was ironized by Voltaire in his
Zadig, in which he reports on the victims of the Lisboan earthquake and asks if
we really do live in the best possible world. By opposing theory and fact one can
easily unravel any system of thought.
In the discussion of vertical Appearance, in Chapter Two, we noted that Im-
manuel Kant solved the conflict by distinguishing between the “transcendental”
and the “transcendent”. The first-mentioned refers to the limits of life in general
and to the idea of that which lies beyond existence. The latter, in turn, relates to
the epistemic fact that we can never know what reality is as such, the famous
Ding an sich, since it is filtered to us always through our sense categories, via
time, space, and subject. In both cases, transcendental and transcendent, the
experienced reality is mere Appearance, or Schein.
It is easy to see how several later philosophies of the world stem from this
distinction, as did all structuralism: the perceived world is mere surface; the real
reality lies behind it. The distinction holds even in biosemiotics, such that the
organism lives in its own reality according to its Ich-Ton. Hence there is no such
thing as a world common to all, a universal Umwelt. Uexküll, a biologist and the
initiator of biosemiotics, even admitted that this view represents a kind of meta-
physics.
Yet, among the German speculative philosophers it was perhaps Hegel who
suffered most from attacks concerning any system’s blindness to the empirical
world. Even to Kierkegaard, his contemporary, Hegel’s system appeared ridicu-
lous, a place where the subject had to build himself a magnificent palace, so to
speak, but himself live behind it in a little doghouse. Anglo-analytic philosophy
and empirical science as a whole have taken a negative attitude toward Hegel.
Bertrand Russell, for example, put in his ironic comment on “John”: if we want
to know him we do not need to know all his relatives, social connections, hob-
bies, and so on. The criticism is directed precisely toward what Russell called the
Hegelian “pudding world”: if you touch one edge of it, the whole thing vibrates.
In opposition to this system stands logical empiricism, the atomistic world of sep-
arate entities.
Another criticism of Hegel has been ideological. John Deely, however, in deal-
ing with Hegel’s concepts of absolute spirit, argues that they ought not be directly
paralleled to German doctrines in the 1930s, as little as Marx should be accused
of the crimes of communism (Deely 2001: 573). For her part, Hannah Arendt con-
sidered Hegel the last great philosopher, to whom all subsequent thinkers are in-
debted. And of course the socially radical Frankfurt School was eminently Hegel-
ian. For example, Theodor W. Adorno’s reasoning is incomprehensible without
knowledge of Hegel. The latter’s system had the reputation of snaring anyone who
started it. It was said in Finland, for instance, that one nineteenth-century docent
needed ten years to get familiar with Hegel, then another ten other years to get
rid of him. Finland’s Johan Vilhelm Snellman (1806–1881) was remarkable as a
statesman precisely because he adopted the Hegelian perspective in his political

action as well as his thought. Another criticism against Hegel is discoursive or
deconstructive. The linguist Roland Posner has argued that Hegel represents con-
ceptual poetry, not serious philosophy.
Despite the criticisms and (mis)uses of Hegel’s thought, his view of the world
as Becoming remains a fascinating concept. Seen in this way, the world stems
from the “immanent emergence of contradictions” and “necessary connections” –
although David Hume had taken great pains to prove that no necessary connec-
tions exist. In his widely known Essay concerning Human Understanding, Hume
writes the following: “There are no ideas which occur in metaphysics more ob-
scure and uncertain than those of ‘power’, ‘force’, ‘energy’, or ‘necessary connec-
tions’ ” (Hume 1748 [1955]: 73). Furthermore, the “scenes of the universe are con-
tinually shifting, and one object follows another in an uninterrupted succession;
but the power or force which actuates the whole machine is entirely concealed
from us” (ibid.: 75). And: “All events seem entirely loose and separate. One event
follows another, but we never can observe any tie between them. They seem con-
joined, but never connected” (ibid.: 85).
Hegel’s view was totally different. Alongside Being there is always Not-Being,
and the Becoming emerges from their conflict. For Hegel, the truth of Being is its
essence (Wesen). In the German language, this word originates from the perfect
participle of the verb to be: gewesen. For Hegel, knowledge wants to clarify the
truth about what is Being-in-oneself and for-oneself, and thus penetrates the sur-
face of things into the background that constitutes the truth of the Being. From
this it follows that Being is in fact Appearance, Schein, and that Appearance is
mere reflection of itself. Hegel describes the Becoming in Being as a movement
from nothingness to nothingness and, from there, back to itself. This is the origin
of such notions as difference, contradiction, and opposition. Furthermore, the
essence determines itself as the Ground, which can be absolute. The essence must
manifest, must appear. The Being into which the essence becomes is essential
Being, or existence.
Finally one arrives at the concept of reality: the Being is not yet real, and
reality is higher than existence. Hence the real is Appearance; it manifests and, in
its exteriority, “is” itself. Moreover, the real, as such, is also possible. Hegel also
distinguishes between the concepts of real necessity and absolute necessity. He
then ponders the relationship of physical-organic life to spiritual life in history.
It is customary to say that, from small causes, great effects emerge in history.
A mere anecdote, for instance, can precipitate an event. According to Hegel, what
is involved is thus only the motivation, an external stimulus, which the inner
spirit of the event would not have needed, and in which role it could and would
have exploited numerous other motives in order to manifest itself. Who, however,
knows the laws of real and absolute necessity and possibility? Without doubt only
a philosopher who has the ability to analyze them. Here we get close to the sol-
ipsism criticized by Deely. According to him, Kant showed that what the mind first
knows is the representation which the mind itself makes. Hence, Deely argues, if
we take it that some ideas as such guide this representation from the outside, as
an “absolute spirit”, we arrive at a dead end (see Deely 2000: 553–572). To which
group Hegel belongs is hard to say, since in his philosophy the representation of
reality becomes a self-reflexive, discoursive process, whose supposed origin in the
Absolute Spirit ultimately remains in the background. The metalanguage whereby
the “reality” is portrayed becomes autonomous, a discourse of its own. The same
phenomenon takes place in Kierkegaard, in his Closing Unscientific Post-Script.
There he engages in a kind of “minimalist” conceptual play, in which the terms
are mirrored, and in which one proceeds very, very slowly, step by step, with only
slight changes. The method is quite the same as in Hegel, although Kierkegaard
intended it to negate Hegelianism. Thus, in both Hegel and Kierkegaard, the world
disappears under its interpretation.
The “worlds” of later philosophers are articulated on this basis. Schopen-
hauer elevated the modality of the “will” to a central position. Later, Karl Jaspers
gave it a more precise definition: Wille ist Kontinuität im Dauer des Sinnes (The will
is continuity in the duration of the sense). This of course means that, unlike in
Hegel’s system, the sense needs to be carried and supported by a human subject
and his modalities. In the arts, for instance, the musician or actor is required,
during performance, to maintain and temporalize the “sense” as a chain of signs.
Otherwise it dissolves into fragments (we say more about this in the chapter below,
on performance). For Schelling the essence of the world was in its soul, die Welt-
seele, which was a feeling, living, and thus, semiotically speaking, modal entity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s idea of Oversoul stemmed from this source. Its continuity
was emphasized by the energeticist philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, most notably by Henri Bergson, for whom the essence of the world
was temporality divided into two categories: the physically measurable time of
temps d’espace, and the experienced, inner time, temps de durée, or duration (see
Bankov 2000). From there it was not a large step to phenomenology and to Ed-
mund Husserl, whose reflections began with inner time-consciousness.
To what extent the semiotic philosophy of Charles S. Peirce, and his triadic
models, can be derived from Hegel has been discussed by Max H. Fisch, among
others (see Fisch 1986: 261–282). Another American philosopher of Peirce’s time,
Josiah Royce, was overtly Hegelian in his theory of the world of interpretation,
which for him always had three members, A, B and C, of which B was the most
important because of its mediation between A and C. Peirce was himself aware of
the “Hegelian” nature of his categories of First, Second, and Third, but said that
he had not studied much Hegel at all. He wrote to his friend Royce in May 1902
and invited him to spend the summer at his home in Arisbe, Delaware, where:
“. . . you and I could pitch into the logical problems and I am sure I could make
it well spent time for you, while with all you should teach me of Hegel etc. I am
equally sure it would tremendously benefit my own work” (cited in Fisch 1986:
262). For Peirce the world was a signic process, or semiosis, but its rules were to
him as objective as natural laws. We shall return to both Peirce and Royce, in later
chapters dedicated to these philosophers (see later in this book more on Royce).
For now we return Europe, where existential philosophy, with all its vari-
ants, turned Hegel upside-down. In Heidegger’s ontology, the world was a place
of alienation, characterized by a sinking into to das Man Sein, average being. The
incompleteness and deficiency of Dasein drive us to the idea of transcendence,
toward which we aspire, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, in the dialectics between
being and nothingness. Even Jaspers thought the world to find its Archimedean
fulcrum in transcendence, to which we compare our reality. To Hannah Arendt, a
pupil of both Heidegger and Jaspers, the world was ruled by compelling causality,
or necessity. Yet it was also a place where something “infinitely improbable”, such
as freedom, could take place. For Emmanuel Lévinas, in turn, the world is always
going toward the infinite or the unknown, and thus never returns to the same
place, unlike in most narrative models, where one returns to the beginning, now
transformed, and creating an overall symmetrical arch.
5.1.2 Artists
What did modernism and postmodernism inherit from the great humanist ages
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Many would reply, nothing positive,
only guilt. They see nothing helpful about such principles as the intentional
fallacy, which is the erroneous claim to know what the author intends, though
his output is something quite different. Or Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy, according to
which we project onto nature our own feelings, for example when we refer to a
“melancholic” landscape or a “laughing” brook; not to mention the argumentum
ad hominem, a type of false reasoning by which one evaluates the person rather
than his or her argument. Goethe represented German neo-humanism, which
some have questioned in the light of twentieth-century history. He supposed the
worlds of both plants and humans to be characterized by the principle of organic
growth, from which entire ecological philosophies have sprung. Goethe’s Young
Werther launched the first youth culture in Europe, and with his Faust created an
artistic figure which historian Oswald Spengler later promoted as a basic myth of
the Western mind. This all was material for Wilhelm Humboldt, who coined the
idea of Bildung, cultivation, which he claimed should prevail in the university in

the form of three kinds of freedom: freedom to teach (Lehrfreiheit), freedom to
learn (Lernfreiheit), and freedom to live (Lebensfreiheit).
Nevertheless, the artist who, in our time, has perhaps suffered most from the
weight of the past was Richard Wagner (1813–1883). Many a scholar has made a ca-
reer, at least in the USA, by declaring Wagner’s operas to be models of anti-Semitic
fantasy, of personal chauvinism, and more. To do so, they must ignore the simple
fact that Wagner never put any such thing in his art works. Wagner was thoroughly
a theater man. If he had wanted to stage the ideologies of his quasi-philosophical
writings, he could and would have done so. In addition, the leading motif of all his
aesthetics was, under the influence of Schopenhauer and Buddhism, the principle
of Mitleid, compassion, which comes quite close to Bloch’s leading principle of
Hoffnung, which we mentioned in the introduction to this chapter. Nor did Wagner
put Buddhism visibly on stage, as did Harry Kupfer in his production of Parsifal.
Wagner became a victim of complete misunderstandings only after his time, when
his art was subordinated to the propaganda of opposing ideologies.
In fact, the Nibelungen Ring constitutes an eminently relevant analysis of
the contemporary world of globalization, of climate crisis, and of the ecological
catastrophe which will necessarily follow unless mankind makes a complete
turn around and gives up the “ring”, that is to say, the will to power. Rhinegold
symbolizes the misuse of natural resources. Wagner raises up mythical figures to
pronounce warnings, but his protagonists do not listen to their voices. Erda,
mother of the Earth, appears twice, singing, “Mein Schlaf is Träumen, mein
Träumen ist Sinnen, mein Sinnen Walten des Wissens” (My sleep is dreaming,
my dreaming is reflection, my reflection is power of knowledge). But she is not
believed, and the consequences are catastrophic. Wagner was a great visionary,
whose musico-mythical world is at once a model, simulacrum, and prophecy.
To be fair, we should consider the example of a contrary type of artist. Leo
Tolstoi was initially anti-Wagnerian, but in the end came to hold somewhat similar
views as Wagner’s. In Vladimir Chertkov’s book, The Last Days of Tolstoi (1922)
we can read fragments of the great author’s diaries. In them Tolstoi speaks of
growth being impossible in a life that knows no suffering, that without tribula-
tions, mankind would end up every badly. Chertkov recalls an instance in 1909,
when Tolstoi returned from his usual solitary walk in the woods, his face beaming
with joy: “I have been thinking much and I am satisfied with the result. It has
become quite clear to me, standing now at the crossroad, without knowing what
to do, that one must always take the decision that brings more self-denial.” Later,
pragmatist Georg Henrik v. Wright did not much appreciate this kind of moralizing
philosophy, and historically speaking, we can say that Tolstoi’s thought paved the
way for communism. In any case, Tolstoi’s world was essentially an axiological
universe of moral choices.
Of course, the writer who best transmitted the world of humanism from the
ancien régime to contemporary times, and who was at the same time completely
“modern”, was Marcel Proust. André Maurois once said that the Proustian world is
based on two principles: time which destroys, and memory which preserves. The
Proustian novel represents impressionist aesthetics in the sense that one phrase
or one minute detail prove more valuable than a long, logical development or nar-
rative structure. The Proustian world was that of la belle époque, a time essentially
euphoric and hedonistic, but from this shallow ground he plumbs metaphysical
depths, qualities that cannot be explained away as literary-historical fact.
In contrast to these humanists, we have writers who remained uncommitted
to any philosophies or systems. Tolstoi’s opposite may be Anton Chekhov, a pair
which Russian literary scholar Vladimir Lakshin portrays as a clash of two world
views. Adding to the disillusioned views of Chekhov we have the Persian writer
and the cult figure of Farsi literature, Sadeq Hedayat (1903–1951). His discovery in
Finland must be credited to Henri Broms, who edited Hedayat’s novel, The Blind
Owl, and in his introduction analyzes the author’s cultural background and pos-
ition in world literature. Influenced by Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, and Omar
Khayam, Hedayat studied in Paris, but traveled in India for two years (1936–1937),
where he wrote the Blind Owl. The novel features complex, surrealistic characters,
and it portrays events that are often nightmarish and full of anguish. The novel
opens: “There are pains in life which bother us silently in loneliness, like a cancer.
This anguish cannot be told to anyone, since in general these incomprehensible
aches have been considered incredible or rare phenomena. If someone speaks or
writes about them, one normally takes him with doubts and scornful smiles.”
Later the narrator ponders: “Am I an individual and personal being? I do not
know, but when I just looked in the mirror, I did not recognize myself. That previ-
ous ego was dead, dissolved, but there is no separating obstacle or gap between
the past and the present. I have to write a story about myself but I do not know
where to start. My whole life is mere fairytale and story. I have pressed a bundle
of grapes and pour the juice, little by little, into the dry throat of an old shadow.”
Some might say that Hedayat was existentialist as even before Sartre’s Nausée.
Hedayat’s personality is thoroughly explored by his pupil M. F. Farzaneh, in his
memoirs, Rencontres avec Sadegh Hedayat (1993). The two had conversations in
the cafes of Tehran and finally in Paris. On the one hand, Hedayat takes an attitude
of rejection toward his pupil and admirer, and sometimes disappears completely;
at other times, he gives him lessons on how to be a writer. Hedayat admits to
greatly admire Gogol and E. T. A. Hoffmann, particularly the latter’s Tomcat Murr.
He says: “If one avoids reading others in the desire to keep oneself unique, if one
does not read and study, one is lost. But on the very day when you start to write,
you have to be yourself. You become a true writer on the same day when you
forget your sources.” He goes on to note, however, that originality for originality’s
sake amounts to mere eccentricity. The book is a fascinating report on a writer’s
destiny, until its end in a lonely Parisian hotel room.
5.1.3 Semioticians
The writer’s world is much based upon talk about the world, and therefore upon
language. In this sense, for instance, Marcel Proust can be considered a great
semiotician, although he does not use that word himself. According to Saussure,
the chaos of the world, and particularly linguistic reality, takes on a kind of order
when one distinguishes between langue and parole. As we know, the first is a set
of conventional rules, which the individual has no power over, but can only to
adopt if one wants to communicate. The latter is an individual realization of the
former. This hypothesis was later elevated into a general principle articulating
the world. It was, for example, the starting point for Lévi-Strauss’s theory that
the world of cultures was dominated by the algebra (langue) of the human brain,
which could be expressed in short formulas, as done by Köngäs-Maranda in his
Structural Models in Folklore (1962). The world of Michel Foucault was ruled by
epistemes of the “archaeological” level. The founder of the Paris school of semi-
otics, A. J. Greimas (1967), first considered the deepest level of meanings to be
isotopies, from which significations started. Later he underlined the cogency of
modalities (Being, Doing, and others; see Chapter One). With these he had already
stepped outside structuralism. The only French theorist to turn Saussure’s thesis
around was Julia Kristeva, for whom the deepest semiotic level was the khora,
the place of desires, kinetic energies, and pulsations. In her view, langue was the
patriarchal order, with all its emphasis on domination.
Most of the French semioticians were nominalists, who viewed significations
as looming in the language itself. But none of them, as far as I know, has spoken
about one of their predecessors, one of the founders of Parisian salons in the
seventeenth century, Madeleine de Scudéry, another semiotician malgré lui, who,
similar to Umberto Eco, came to the realization that signs are created so as to
enable us to lie.
A plethora of literary salons emerged in Paris in the mid-seventeenth century,
and their keepers considered themselves to belong to a community of the precious
(Les Précieuses). lived in a fictive, novelesque world, in which they created literary
portraits, but hiding them behind pseudonyms borrowed from ancient mythology.
The precious had their own codes of behavior. They said, for instance, that in the
production of enjoyment, imagination means more than reality. When one sins
only in one’s fantasies, one does not commit sin in reality. One could convey one’s
emotions only to those who knew how to appreciate them. A thought had no worth
if everyone understood it. A true “precious” had to speak differently from other
people, so that his thoughts would be understood only by his equals. Henrick
Schück, the Swedish literary historian, has picked up some metaphors used by the
precious: les enfants de l’air, children of the air, meant sighs; les chers souffrants,
dear sufferers, meant feet. Chairs were called les commodités de la conversation.
With such private language, criticisms could be made milder. For instance, if one
wanted to say, “There is nothing good about this book”, one could say instead,
“L’on ne trouve point de quoi s’arrester dans ce livre” (We find little to dwell on
in this book). An ugly girl might be called une belle à faire peur (a beauty who
frightens one). Some of the metaphors they invented have remained in general
use; for instance, “His forehead became clouded” and “to mask one’s thoughts”
(Schück 1961: 104). The precious became so famous that Molière wrote his com-
edy Les Précieuses ridicules in order to parodize them. In this play one finds the
following scene, which takes place in a theater loge:
Magdeon: Apprenez, sotte, à vous énoncer moins vulgairement. Dites: “Voila un nécessaire,
qui demande si vous êtes en commodité d’être visible.”
Marotte: Dame! Je n’entends point de latin et je n’ai pas appris, comme vous la filofie dans le
Grand Cyre.
(Magdeon, pointing to indicating the loge: Learn, stupid, to express yourself less vulgarly.
Say instead: “Oh there is the necessity which demands that you permit the commodity to
be visible.”
Marotte: Dear lady! I cannot at all understand Latin, and unlike you I have not learned the
beautiful language of the Great Cyrus.”)
Marotte is referring to the gigantic novel by Madeleine de Scudéry, Le Grand Cyrus,

which takes place in the ancient Persia, but whose protagonists were in fact mem-
bers of the “precious” literary salons of Paris, and were based upon their literary
portraits. The precious particularly admired the Queen of Sweden, whose literary
interests had made a strong impact on Parisians. Not only was Scudéry’s novel
enchanting to the precious, it also holds the world record for being the longest
novel ever written, consisting of about 10,000 pages in its original form. Today Le
Grande Cyrus is available on the internet, as well as in edited book form. Highly
readable, even with its Baroque nuances in orthography, the novel’s plot is not so
fanciful as one might first imagine.
Why do we return to such a world? Because Madeleine de Scudéry represents
another precursor of the semiotic movement. What is semiotics if not everyday
phenomena described in special terms and conceptual metalanguage, which only
5.2 Closing thoughts | 111
the initiated can understand? Semiotics prides itself on being an international

language of scholars, whether from Europe, Africa, China, or Persia. Those who
identify themselves as Peirceans, Greimassians, Lotmanians, or existential semi-
oticians – they always understand each other. Whether others understand them
is another matter, and one that is perhaps not so important. Umberto Eco said that
semiotics is a method whereby simple things can be made complex. This, indeed,
was the goal of Les Précieuses!
From this premise, several variants later developed. For Mikhail Bakhtin the
world was a dialogue. No concept was valid as such, but only as it belonged to a
dialogue, where it represented either familiar or alien speech. From this it follows
that concepts are ultimately unpredictable; hence the end result of a dialogue can-
not be known by anyone in advance. Bakhtin took as his model the “polyphonic”
novel by Dostoevsky, which constituted a kind of interplay of consciousnesses.
Another variant of this view is that the world is a constant translation from one
language to another, and not only from language, but from one culture to another.
Peeter Torop, in his theory of translation, combines Bakhtin’s thought with that
of Yuri Lotman, founder of the Tartu-Moscow school of semiotics. For Lotman,
the world consisted in the movement between culture and non-culture, and the
“translation” of non-culture into culture. The Tartu school presumed that some-
where inside a culture, in its deep level, existed a kind of generator of structurality,
from which the semiosphere emerged, the latter being a continuum of signs that
enable the social life of humanity, as the biosphere enables its biological life.
Another Tartu semiotician, Peet Lepik, has pondered the universality of Lotman’s
theory and its connections to the magical-mythical world view. Thomas A. Sebeok,
one of the leading semioticians of the twentieth century, introduced the idea that
the world is a global semiosis, in which our “semiotic self” lives between illusion
and reality. In fact, Sebeok once argued that semiotics does not study the world
at all, but rather our illusions about it.
Finally, our world is also one of action, which returns us to our early thoughts
on the subject’s choices. Augusto Ponzio, in his work on communication, states
that we also have the freedom to choose non-functionality, diritto all’infunzional-
ità, which brings us back to Heidegger’s principle of letting things go, Gelassen-
heit.
5.2 Closing thoughts
I have not yet stated my own world view, but perhaps it has become clear from the
reflections above. In my model of the world, I endeavor to create a kind of system
that takes its place alongside French nominalism, the Hegelian principle of con-
tinuity, and the world of the body. My vision is much like what Lévi-Strauss meant
by his notion of bricolage. One makes culture of what is at hand and by what man
is as a body. Some thinkers would say that everything is body. This, however,
almost amounts to a reification of the body. Man is all the time corporeal, true,
but he also strives continuously to transcend, to exceed the body’s boundaries;
without doing so, he simply cannot stay comfortable in his own skin. Therefore
the human mind, the world of one’s Dasein, is based upon the two principles
expounded in various places in this book: Me and Society (as internalized), Moi
and Soi. A constant tension exists between the two, but there is also liberation
from this eternal struggle by transcendence, in the Kantian sense. Semiotics is
a doubly transcendental science. On the one hand, by signs we refer to what is
not present; signs detach us from the primitive reality, which leads to metaphors,
symbols, and allegories. On the other hand, what we do with signs – each act of
communication – is a transcendental act, since the object and goal of the commu-
nication is a projection from subject A to subject B, a “leap” toward the Other, the
unknown, alien-psyche.
Chapter 6
Signs around Us – Umwelt, Semiosphere
and Signscape
6.1 Introduction
Central scientific and other kinds of problems are often very simple in nature. This
holds true for a theme such as “environment”. Yet we must immediately expand
the notion a little: a surrounding cannot be thought without the thinking of some-
thing that it surrounds. This “something” can be any phenomenon whatsoever
that captures our attention: people, work, an act, behavior, an event – anything
whatsoever that distinguishes itself something with limits, as the center of some-
thing, as something discrete – in a word, as something which has an environment.
Let us refer to this center with the term “subject”, evoking at the same time its
etymology in English or in French as sujet, which may refer not only to a person,
but also to a topic, matter, issue.
From this more general, almost naïve standpoint we encounter such univer-
sal problems as the relationship of a subject to its environment. Do surrounding
conditions determine one’s life? or is the fate of the subject determined by what
is within him or her? In other words, Are our activities predestined by genes and
biology? or guided by education, culture, society or the environment? Generally,
in any theory the emphasis will go to one or the other. Of course what is involved
is the dialectics between the inner and outer, between endosemiosis and exose-
miosis (as said in the theory of Uexküll), or between the interoceptive and the ex-
teroceptive, as A. J. Greimas put it. The Finnish educational philosopher J. A. Hollo
had the idea that man was something between these two entities. Our self is the
domain in which we can make choices and decisions which can partly negate or
refute, improve or fight against biological determinism and/or change the envir-
onment into something more favorable (insofar as it is negative) for the goals,
aspirations, growth, intentions and development of this “self”. We have arrived
at the domain of the existential, the significance and cogency of which no doubt
depend on which factor we stress more, the environment or the subject.
6.2 Milieu – Taine
In the philosophy of arts one of the best-known theories of milieu is that by the
French aesthetician Hippolyte Taine, one which has continued to have impact
114 | 6 Signs around Us – Umwelt, Semiosphere and Signscape
thought, to greater or lesser degrees, from the nineteenth century to the present.
According to Taine, art was necessarily and irrefutably the product of its environ-
ment. Such a view was “naturally” understandable amidst the general optimism
of la belle époque when the theory was formulated, since it has an inbuilt ideology
stemming from the view that Paris was the best possible environment in which to
exercise artistic and spiritual-intellectual gifts; during those periods when the city
was not like that, an optimism reigned that things could be turned around, and
the environment bettered.
Taine opens his study: “We have to first admit the fact that an artwork is not
a detached or separate phenomenon, and we have to show that connection on
which it is dependent and which explains it”. The first such “connection”, envir-
onment or paradigm where Taine situates art is in the total output of the author.
The second is given by other artists of the same country or period, schools and
“artist families”. The third environment is broader still:
. . . the world which surrounds it and whose taste is similar to it . . . The state of the customs
and spiritual life influences the artist and his audience, and they are not at all separated from
other people . . . behind their voices . . . we distinguish so to say a distant murmur, infinite
and multiple voice of the people which as a joint choir sings around them . . . .
Illustrations of Taine’s conception of the environment appear in the work of

several artists of his time, beginning with writers such as Émile Zola and Gustave
Flaubert. Their novels exhibit a naturalist aesthetics as well as protagonists
presented as both products and victims of the conditions of their time. Very much
like Zola and Taine is our Finnish sculptor Ville Vallgren in the most congenial
works of his Parisian period, such as Misère, Désespoir (1893), Malédiction (1899),
La Douleur (1917). The dysphoric nature of these works set them apart from
Vallgren’s other creations, which generally follow the sunny disposition of la belle
époque, with its cheerful praise of the joys of life. In Vallgren’s works just listed,
disaster envelopes people; it surrounds them as a weighty fog, as a crushing,
depressing fate. These persons are not responsible for their unhappiness; it is
caused, rather, by a harsh environment and unjust society. Hence one can see
in such works a social critique of the type of Zola. But at the same time, there is
a kind of beauty in them. Vallgren knew Zola personally and certainly read his
works, insofar as he read anything at all. In addition, Vallgren’s sculptures extend
the heritage of naturalism and of French classicism.
This view of environment and subject is, in an interesting way, “modern” in
the historic sense of the word, if one thinks of later theoreticians of these subjects.
As early as in the 1950’s, the Belgian structuralist Lucien Goldmann, in his book
Le dieu caché, was arguing that to explain a work meant inserting it into ever-
expanding surroundings and circles. For example, to explain Racine’s tragedies
6.3 Surrounding/surrounded | 115
and Pascal’s Pensées, one has to relate them to the seventeenth-century religious
movement called Jansenism, which in turn cannot be analyzed without locat-
ing it in the larger structure(s) of French society. And so on. At the same time,
explanation works in the other direction as well: inwardly, towards the center,
towards understanding. A “burrowing” into these circles, which, at the least, calls
for close reading of Racine and Pascal, is indisposable if one wants to under-
stand seventeenth-century French society. At the core of this understanding lies
the “text”, with its structures and messages.
The theory outlined thus far establishes a clear distinction between environ-
ment and “subject”. But is this relation as unambiguous as Taine and Goldmann
and many other sociological theorists have claimed? Does knowledge of the envir-
onment permit us to infer the kinds of subjects that will inhabit it? Or does such
knowledge predict the kinds of works and acts that will take place there? Hardly.
For the relation between environment and subject is not one of organic unfolding,
but rather one of transformations, ruptures, re-evaluations, re-proportioning, and
so on. So many things can take place in one’s environment, that the individual is
in no way, nor at all times, at the mercy of his surroundings.
The semiotic perspective mostly shares in this view: the sign is an autonom-
ous unit, and although it may take place in the most rudimentary situation of
communication (following Jakobson’s model of sender-message-receiver), the
sign is also independent of that situation. Sign and art-work are detached from all
their surroundings. The relationship is not a causal one between sign and society,
or gender, or body, or any external thing whatsoever. Rather, the relationship
is strictly semiotic one. We can come back to this problem when pondering the
nature of communication, and whether it represents a kind of causal issue or
not. The sign-surroundings relationship can be articulated in many ways, which
Peirce demonstrated as early as when he distinguished his sign categories of
icons, indexes, and symbols. It is thus easy to understand why semiotics, the
study of signs, is unpopular in any totalitarian ideology. Semiotics allows for the
liberty of sign and subject to work out their own relation with the environment,
which can never completely determine that relation as much as some totalitarian,
fascist, and other despotic systems of government have tried to do. Still, the will
to control and dominate remains the main one of any administrational system,
particularly in the present world of technosemiotic and global marketing.
6.3 Surrounding/surrounded
For a different view of the problem at hand, I turn now to the founder of the Paris
school of semiotics, A. J. Greimas, and to his notions of surrounding/surrounded
(englobant/englobé). In one of his early works, Sémantique structurale (1967), Grei-

mas theorizes this pair of notions for the first time. This happens in the last chapter
of his treatise when he is analyzing a novel by Georges Bernanos, Le journal d’un
curée de campagne. As known, that analysis is based upon the functioning of the
general category of life/death, which Greimas will later come to consider the fun-
damental axiological model of an individual. In this case, however, the category
serves as a kind of deixis: one can be dead even when alive, or alive when dead. A
person’s very existence is based on these categories, which are two contradictory
terms that complement and complete each other at the level of one’s noological
essence. In a way, this category surrounds all the events of the novel by Bernanos.
Greimas claims to have borrowed the notions of englobé/englobant from existen-
tialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, and he prefers them over the similar notions of
contenant/contenu. Greimas says that the general category of englobé/englobant
is not a particular feature in Bernanos, but rather serves as a bridge whereby
“. . . one can move unnoticed from the ‘abstract’ to the figurative by transforming
concepts into actants, or ideas into functions.” (Greimas 1966: 226)
Greimas then scrutinizes all the semes of the novel in this light, ending with a
complete formulation of their taxonomies and a definitive transformational model
of the Bernanosian universe.
Greimas’s analysis is of interest mainly in its treatment of existential prob-
lems; at the same time, it is a completely structuralist project. The main protag-
onist meets with a tragic end, and the actor of death destroys his body from the
inside. The novel as such is a proof of Tainean milieu theory, but here it comes
about on the interoceptive axis. The basic problematic of the novel thus restates
the irreconcilable and irreducible conflict between the subject and his/her envir-
onment.
In general, the semiotic view on the central issue of environment/subject or
surrounding/surrounded sparked and continues to spark new types of theories,
especially in philosophies of anthropology. The structuralist view of course em-
phasizes the role of the environment. In fact, the subject qua subject ultimately
vanishes and is only a product of his surrounding system, an intersection of sys-
tems; the subject disappears as soon as our systems of knowledge take on new
configurations, as Michel Foucault argued in his influential The Order of Things (1).
In this matter, Foucault’s thought agreed with that of Lévi-Strauss, whose ba-
sic enterprise in his Structural Anthropology (1963) was to study the categories of
nature and culture – both of which were viewed as surrounding man, not repres-
enting him. This view argued that no unit, term, lexeme, sign, or subject was sig-
nificant as such but only as a part of its context, environment, and structure. This
fundamental belief was shared by Yuri Lotman and the Tartu-Moscow School,
and as such is classic structuralism in its thoroughgoing relativity, and the fact
6.4 New models of communication | 117
that all these authors emphasize that no sign or text can function alone, isolated
from other signs. Such a continuum, which both enables one’s social life and
surrounds us, was as we know christened the “semiosphere” by Lotman. Further-
more, Lotman and his group argued vigorously that every culture is surrounded
by the sphere of disorganisation, which pre-existing cultural groups attempt to
conquer and change into a culture.
All science starts with the presupposition that any phenomenon under exam-
ination is situated in its proper environment. That phenomenon can, for instance,
be paradigmatic; that is to say, the phenomenon is seen as one case among all the
various alternatives, which either exist alongside this phenomenon or as some
of its numerous possibilities. Another scientific point of departure is to situate a
given phenomenon within the intertextual network, in the milieu that genetically
“causes” or produces this phenomenon as a “subject”. This could be considered
a kind of syntagmatic environment, in which the phenomenon is connected, by
various relations of metonymy, with its surrounding elements.
In the case of biography, one who studies the subject and its environment
can embed his subject in a network of two kinds of relations, one “syntagmatic”
and the other “paradigmatic”. Let us presume, for example, that we are studying
Sibelius. In speaking of his famous biography of the composer, eminent musi-
cologist Erik Tawaststjerna said his method was similar to that of Thomas Mann
and Marcel Proust: Sibelius was portrayed via his contemporaries, which included
painter Gallen-Kallela, writer Adolf Paul, conductor Robert Kajanus, friend Axel
Carpelan, composer Ferruccio Busoni, and others. These all stood in a syntag-
matic relation to the Finnish master. On the other hand are “paradigmatic” re-
lations. Regarding Sibelius’s oeuvre, for example, Tawaststjerna compared the
composer’s output to that of other actors in the same field, who offered altern-
ative solutions, yet in absentia: Mahler, Strauss, Wagner, Schönberg, Debussy,
and so on. There were also subjects (e.g., Busoni) who occupied both syntagmatic
and paradigmatic roles; that is to say, people who influenced Sibelius musically,
aesthetically, and in other paradigmatic ways, and who were at the same time
his contemporaries, sharing in the same “syntagmatic” course of events, which
included artistic milieu, historical events, and the like.
6.4 New models of communication
But an opposing view is shared by the “new” semiotics, in which, to our surprise,
biosemiotics and existential semiotics agree. They share a central claim, namely,
that the environment does not dominate the subject but, rather, the other way
round: the subject determines the environment. In fact the subject, by virtue of its
“choices”, “determines” the kind of milieu in which it lives. The theory of social
construction plays an in-between role, with its view that each sign, term, text or
personality is a construed unit that could also be otherwise. Hence, they are all
products of surrounding structures and systems. Yet, since these structures are
essentially arbitrary and not dictated by nature, they can be changed, and it is
the subject which has the power to change them! On this point – that the subject
can make its own possibilities – biosemiotics and existential semiotics agree.
In an ordinary communication model, such as that by Jakobson (mentioned
above) or the one by Shannon and Weaver, the center is the message, and some-
times the person. But this subject is surrounded by other conditions of commu-
nication. Ultimately, the whole communication is framed by external conditions,
or “reality”. The decisive factor here is “context”, since it constitutes the environ-
ment of communication.
At least it is clear that sometimes we may have two superimposed functions
or that two aspects can be stressed at the same time; for example, an artist or a
politician, when launching new ideas, at the same time creates the environment
that is appropriate for them. Wagner creates Bayreuth, functionalists Bauhaus,
semioticians Imatra, and so on. But normally, the simultaneous operating of two
functions is too much. Just as it is almost impossible to receive both code and mes-
sage at the same time, it is hard to pay equal attention to both message and con-
text. If the context is underlined, then no attention is given to the message, which
then acts as a side-effect. The same holds true for the relation of code/context.
If in some situation all of one’s attention goes into the effort to speak correctly
or behave in the right manner, then one cannot enjoy the context; for example,
a celebration or ceremony. Any element can cease to be pertinent if attention is
focused on other elements that surround it.
New models can be sketched that augment and improve our own, rather
schematic view of communication. I have delineated five new variants which
could be taken into account (see Figure 6.1).
All of these cases display different ways our subject relates to its “object”, its
environment, or even also to another subject.
6.5 Umwelt and Uexküll
As a contrast to theories stressing the role of surroundings, semiotic models have

emerged which instead emphasize the centrality of the subject as the “surroun-
ded”. A theory of biosemiotics was developed just before the middle of the last
century by the Estonian biologist Jakob von Uexküll, though his thought has be-
gun to influence semiotics heavily only during the last decades (with the exception
6.5 Umwelt and Uexküll | 119
Figure 6.1: Models of communication
of Italy, where, according to Ugo Volli, he became known as early as the 1960’s due
to his activities in Naples). The fundaments of Uexküll’s thinking were presented
in his concise essay, “Bedeutungslehre” (1940). Among other revelations, the es-
say shows that approaches to biological research have not all been based on a
Comtean or “positivistic” sense of determinism, but contrarily, that much biolo-
gical discourse takes place in argumentation that at times comes to sound rather
metaphysical.
According to Uexküll, movement in nature is not mechanically causal, but
is based upon two meaningful processes: Merken – to signify – and Wirken – to
react, to influence. He believed that any object whatsoever can serve as a car-
rier of meaning (Bedeutungsträger). This means two things: either the object is
a Merkmalträger (sign carrier) received by a subject, or it is this subject, whom

Uexküll calls the “meaning receiver” (Bedeutungsempfänger). A subject must have
a special Merkmalorgan in order to receive it.
The most important observation by Uexküll is that each organism lives in its
own subjective universe of signs, which he calls the Umwelt. Objectively speaking,
there is no single Umwelt common to all species. For instance, to one hiking in a
meadow, the “meadow” represents completely different realities, depending on
whether the hiker is an insect, cow, human being, or even another part of the field
itself (say, a plant swaying in the wind). Uexküll compares each organism to a kind
of clock mechanism, whose alarm starts to ring when we activate certain mechan-
isms. Those mechanisms are signs of the Umwelt, which accepts the mechanisms
as its Bedeutungsträger. To Uexküll, every organism has its own Ich Ton, its own
“me tone”. These tones altogether constitute the Lebenston, the “life-tone” of the
organism.
The semiotic nature of Jakob v. Uexküll’s theory has been further elucidated
by his son, Thure v. Uexküll. As bases for my own reflections, I have tried to use his
ideas concerning two kinds of signs, namely, endosigns and exosigns. We are far
from the positivists’ thesis of reducibility, i.e., that phii phenomena could without
residue be translated into f-phenomena; rather, it is the other way around.
We try to solve the problem of what it means when we speak about nature
and organism as epistemic categories. Thure von Uexküll thought that his father’s
Umweltslehre fitted particularly well together with Peirce’s triadic semiotics. But
there is no reason to presume that Peirce’s is the only semiotic theory compatible
with the idea of Umwelt. For instance, the notion of Umwelt is doubtless akin to
Greimas’s “isotopy” and Lotman’s “semiosphere” (or more specifically, Lotman’s
notion of culture). An organism, semiotic actor, or subject can fall, says Uexküll,
into an Umwelt or isotopy that might or might not be one of its own. It can fall into
the semiosphere of its own or into one outside it. Every culture likewise has its own
Ich-Ton by which it recognizes and identifies the signs around it (Merkung) and in
turn functions and acts (Wirkung) in the sphere of non-culture which surrounds
it. What does not belong to Umwelt, belongs to Otherness.
6.6 Dasein . . .
Let’s move now from biosemiotics to existential semiotic views of the concept
of surrounding/surrounded. We could take as a motto a scene from the end of
Goethe’s Faust II. Faust, now in his old age and gripped by a progressive optimism,
has started to turn wild marshes into manageable fields, and launched many other
environmental projects which he believes will benefit humankind. He has, among
6.6 Dasein . . . | 121
other things, ordered the burning of a hut, the home of two old persons (Filemon
and Baucis), in order to make space for his projects. But suddenly four sorcerers
arrive uninvited at his palace: Sorge, Mangel, Schuld, and Not (Sorrow, Need, Guilt,
and Worry). Faust refuses to admit their power, even when Sorrow blows upon
him and says, “People are blind all their lives, now you Faust become blind at the
end of your way!” Faust loses his sight, but rebuffs Sorrow by taking the loss as a
gain: “Die Nacht scheint tiefer tief hereinzudringen / Allein im Innern leuchtet helles
Licht.”
This scene from Faust foregrounds the problem of surrounding and subject in
a new manner. The environment, the surrounding, is dark, gloomy, and evil, but
its center, the surrounded, is internally illuminated and good. This is what Jaspers
meant by his concepts of Existenzerhellung. Correspondingly, one can imagine a
situation in which the surrounded is evil whereas the environment is good. In that
way, we bring an ethical value judgement into our distinction. In fact, present here
is the whole emergence of semiotics as a part of the project of the “modern”.
First of all, man exists prior to the Cartesian question, a part of the predeter-
mined cosmos and its order. Hence there is no difference between both subject
and environment experienced as cosmos.
But then man becomes aware of himself as a separate being, as a discrete
sign, semiotically speaking, along with the principle of the cogito, and as a con-
sequence man tries to rediscover his lost unity with the cosmos. Since he has
distinguished himself from his Umwelt, he has to express himself with particular
signs and assume that via these signs he will be heard and understood. This is
simply the origin of the concept of sign according to existential semiotics: signs
are needed in order to mediate between man and his environment. As long as one
is a part of cosmos, however, he does not need what Husserl called the Ausdruck,
or “expressive”, aspect of signs.
In existential semiotics, the subject is surrounded in a double sense; first, by
his Dasein, his existence, which includes other subjects and objects. This rela-
tionship becomes “narrativized”, which is to say that such models are valid here
whose catalyzing force is desire, Trieb; the subject strives for an object and tries to
take possession of it. Either he is disjuncted from it, which launches all narration,
or he has gained it, become conjuncted with it, and is satisfied, such that the inner
movement of the Dasein is at rest and remains mere being.
In Greimas’s theory, both subjects and objects are modal and modalized en-
tities. In the subjunctive words of art related to semiotic modalization, they Know,
Can, Want, Must (have obligations), and Believe something and in something
regarding other subjects. An essential addition to this universe of classical semi-
otics is the introduction of the notion of transcendence into existential semiotics,
which surrounds even the Dasein. The concept of transcendence brings with it
extremely complex philosophical-conceptual problems, since one can think that

values “dwell” in the transcendence in a virtual state and from there exercise their
impact on the existence of people. After all, ultimately a major part of human-
kind’s Dasein takes place as a dialectic between Dasein and transcendence, since
it belongs to the mere concept of sign that the physical part of sign, sign as a sign
vehicle, refers to and that yields something which is invisible, inaudible, unob-
servable, which is absent but present at the same time, since it is remembered and
can be recalled by the use of a sign. A basic gift of being human is our ability to
transcend, to exit in our mind the present deixis, hic nunc ego. Upon this ability is
based all imagination, the logic of possible worlds, as well as the capacity to form
metalanguage, to agree that with the latter I can transcend my present language,
I step outside it, I observe and reflect upon it.
6.7 . . . and transcendence
A major part of our existence takes place alongside our imagining of reality and
in the dialectics between Dasein and transcendence. Transcendence is therefore
not something that surrounds us in the same sense as space surrounds us and the
earth, but is present all the time. Transcendence is an aspect of reality, since the
ways we conceive it, at every moment, influence our actions, acts, and ways of
being in Dasein. Resorting to this fundamental nature of reality and existence,
it would be as reasonable to attempt to reduce everything into transcendental
concepts, as Plato did, the difference being that they are reduced to sensory data
of common-sense experience. What is involved is an epistemic choice.
Where is transcendence located? It is most commonly imagined to be an
empty space that surrounds Dasein. In existential semiotics, I have so far outlined
two ways of viewing transcendence: (1) either as emptiness, le Néant, or (2) as
plenitude, fullness. Both views have philosophical kin, both forerunners and in
the present: Nothingness or emptiness among the existentialists, and plenitude
(kerygma, fullness) among the gnostics.
Yet transcendence can also be situated in relation to the temporal axis of
human beings or other organisms, in the category of life/death, as the state that
both precedes life and that comes after it. The latter alternative leads to the origin
of religion as a particular semiotic inference about what happens to the subject
after life. Into what kind of “environment” is the subject then shifted? We find a
musical “speculation” on this question by Edward Elgar, the British composer,
who wrote an oratorio called The Dream of Gerontius, which consists of two parts.
The first one, rather short, takes place in the “Dasein”, so to say, and the latter in
6.7 . . . and transcendence | 123
transcendence. Likewise, the main emphasis in Dante’s Divine Comedy is on the

latter.
Let us assume, however, that transcendence can be inhabited by such entities
as values, and that perhaps something remains there after the wanderings of our
subject in Dasein – how can this be logically-conceptually thinkable? If life in the
environment of Dasein were characterized by modalities, could then “life” in tran-
scendence be represented by something like “metamodalities”? Are, for instance,
values waiting there, as ideas to be actualised and realised in Dasein, such that
metamodalities would mediate or “control the traffic” between Dasein and tran-
scendence? If we still cannot imagine our subject as such as an entity carrying
modalities in transcendence, then is there any sense in extending the discussion
so as to speak in this respect of kinds of “metamodalities”? They are of course
hypotheses, abductive inferences of the nature of transcendence, which are partly
based upon certain observations on certain phenomena in Dasein, which cannot
be explained other than as consequences of certain phenomena in transcendence.
Such knowledge is naturally very uncertain, since there can be another hypothesis
that could explain these phenomena as well. Transcendence would, in the Peir-
cean sense, be an abductive presumption that emerges from such reasoning as
follows:
1. a certain phenomenon perceived in the Dasein: an act of kindness, aesthetic
experience, revelation of truth . . . .
2. a rule: the notions of goodness, beauty, truth are transcendental, transgress-
ing the boundaries of our Dasein . . . .
3. therefore: these perceived phenomena fulfil transcendence amidst Dasein.
One might well imagine a counter-argument, based, say, on such a theory as Pla-
tonism:
1. a certain perceived phenomenon as above . . . .
2. rule: under certain circumstances people behave like that . . . .
3. this phenomenon belongs exclusively to the domain of such phenomena, and
we do not need a concept such as transcendence in order to explain it.
In modern terms: What kind of functional environment plays host to our notions
of value, soul, metamodalities, and the like, and forms the environment of “tran-
scendence”?
This argument comes close to the so-called “transcendental argument” by
Charles Taylor, as Sami Pihlström (2002) has pointed out. Namely, certain hu-
man behaviours, especially in the moral and ethical field, cannot be explained
by mere “pragmatist” or “natural” criteria without supposing they have a kind of
transcendental existence (see Pihlström 2002: 14)
What kind of Umwelt is it? In his overview of ecosemiotics, in his Handbuch

der Semiotik, the section on Kultursemiotische Modelle der Mensch-Umwelt-Be-
ziehung, Winfried Nöth presumes that the view of the omnipresence of sign on all
levels of human environment leads to pansemiotics, which explains all phenom-
ena of environment as signs. He distinguishes three subcategories: (1) the properly
pansemiotic view, which is not far away from Peirce’s idea that the “. . . whole uni-
verse is perfused by signs, unless it right away consists of them”. The philosophy
of Peirce’s synechism, moreover, argued that in such a universe all signs would be
interdependent. Peirce would not have had any logical difficulties here, although
he did not have a theory of subject, which would have been carrying such signs of
the universe. He even used the metaphor of evolutionary love or connected such
very modal entities to the formation of the universe and the “semiotic web”.
6.8 Semiosphere, Lotman and Ruskin
Likewise, Lotman’s idea of semiosphere is such a pansemiotic model. Even he

had a theory of a subject carrying the semiosphere, a subject that could as well
be a collective unit; and this theory was limited within a speech of culture. But
when culture was determined as a group of texts, he never discussed the essen-
tial empirical problem that would come to the mind of a sociologist or British
anthropologist, namely, which social group or indigenous tribe would produce
and use such texts. In the pansemiotic model, signs thus do not have a partic-
ular “sender” occupying that spot on the communication model. In this sense,
the pansemiotic model means a return to pre-Cartesian, cosmological thinking,
albeit without well-founded theological reasoning (cf. Charles Taylor, Sources of
the Self ).
It was thus not at all naïve when a Lithuanian student once asked Thomas
A. Sebeok, Are you a pantheist? Instead, according to Nöth another species of
Umwelt thought was the magical model in which the environment also transmits
signs, but their manipulator was man and Nature the receiver, in which one wants
to produce a certain phenomenon by this activity. (Tzvetan Todorov has studied
the discourse of magic in this light.)
The third alternative is the mythological model in which the environment
is narrativized; it is transformed into a battlefield of agent and acts superior to
humankind (Northrop Frye’s mythological mode of storytelling). These stories in
turn explain why certain matters have been allowed entry and initiated into the
Dasein. Such mythical stories, then – the immediate empirical Dasein of our sub-
ject to another environment, namely, that of transcendence – can mediate the
relationship between these two surroundings.
Accordingly, mythology and mythical stories provide us with an excellent

source if we want to clarify whether the semiotic notions of the world of Dasein
remain valid in transcendence. Since prehistoric times, they have been kinds
of abductive models of the average man about transcendence and its nature,
and particularly its impact on Dasein. If one reads, for instance, a handbook
of mythology on Antiquity or Kalevala, and observes how certain mythological
persons behave in transcendence, one notices that the logic of their sanctions,
taboos, modalities and so on are remarkably similar to the ones applied in Dasein.
But a great difference remains: they can enact modalities and modalisations
which considerably transgress the limits of everyday modalities. Yet, which part
of such a mythology is mere mythologism, which is apt as a topic of art yet is no
longer believed, and which part is the primary mythicism? John Ruskin warned
against projecting one’s emotions and modalities upon nature, and invented
the term “pathetic fallacy” to portray such fallacious reasoning. If the landscape
seemed melancholic, this was merely a projection of our own, human emotions, a
pathetic fallacy. In this view, modalities could not exist beyond our human world
of Dasein.
An essential question is what kind of theory of subject would be necessary in
order for the existential semiotic vision of two Daseins and transcendence to be
correct and functional. What is involved is obviously not a theory of empirical self
in the line of John Locke, David Hume, Bertrand Russell. It must be another type
of subject theory.
6.9 Heidegger’s view
In Heidegger’s philosophy we of course meet the concept of Umwelt. He says in his

Sein und Zeit: “Die nächste Welt des alltäglichen Dasein ist die Umwelt” (1967: 66).
(The closest of world of our daily being-there is environment.) To his mind, “Um-”
part of the word “Umwelt” contains a reference to spatiality (Räumlichkeit). He
refers to the concept of worldliness. In the background looms the ontology which
spatializes the “world”, according to which the world is seen as a kind of res
extensa or dimensional space, whose opposition would be res cogitans, or man.
In other words, man/subject has separated himself as a discrete cogitans, a con-
ceiving subject in this world.
Now we can ask to what extent the existential semiotic concepts of Dasein
and transcendence are as such a notion related to Umwelt, or whether in this con-
text they change into something too spatializing. Heidegger believes that Umwelt
essentially entails the notion of being-with: we are in an environment in which
there are tools and cares, concrete things and practical activities; nature becomes
concrete, but is not exhausted therein: the plants of the botanist are not the same
plants as those growing in a field. Heidegger’s world is not identical with the
practical interests of caring or being concerned. It is typical that he introduces
his concepts of sign precisely at this moment. His theory is compatible with that of
Lotman in the sense that each sign manifests the idea of concreteness and position
in the world as a whole, or it is established in its semiosphere or isotopy.
Nevertheless, Heidegger does not postulate the ontology of sign by transcend-
ence or with the fact that it is in the essence of a sign to refer to something which
is not present. Contrarily, signs and tools always refer to that context to which
they belong. This has as its consequence that signs occupy, so to say, their cor-
rect and predestined place in the environment. In Heidegger’s world things are
in their proper places; they have their own ontology. In his vision the world is
revealed or uncovered, and things find their places by themselves. His subject is
not the same as the one of existential semiotics, who, as said above, between the
environment and biological codes is capable of action and deciding where signs
belong and how they are used. In the world of existential semiotics, signs are
not automatically in their proper places as part of a kind of “generative” iconico-
ontological process, as I have dared to characterize the systems of both Heidegger
and Greimas. When he speaks of the boundaries of the environment, Heidegger
evokes a mode of being best called interiority: “This means that the extensional
being is itself closed by some extensional which by its boundaries surrounds it”
(Heidegger 1967: 135).
Therefore both the interior and the surroundings – or as Greimas more el-
egantly put it, englobé/englobant – are in space. A tool has, to his “mind”, its
place, and it is situated all around: es liegt herum . . . . Place is not here interpreted
arbitrarily as something in which things are presented. Place is always a given
“there” or “area” to which a tool belongs. This area to which things belong is for
Heidegger “the surrounding domain” (Gegend). Quite correctly Heidegger notes
that we often become aware of this belonging to a certain place only “when some-
thing is encountered that is not in its proper place”, something has fallen into the
wrong surroundings. Greimas would say, into a “false isotopy”.
It would be erroneous, though, to identify Heidegger’s theory of environment
with such objects as signs and tools, since it essentially includes other beings.
Being is to be-with. The problem of the “who” of being is resolved by the fact
that being-there is always being of myself. It is self-evident to his mind. Thereafter
come others of “myself,” or das Man and other public forms of being, in which the
“me” relinquishes its being of itself into “das Man”. Now, Heidegger does have a
theory of subject. But essential here is that the transcendence surrounding the
Dasein cannot be spatialised except with great difficulties. Transcendence rather
appears as a certain illumination of the Dasein, as Jaspers thought, or as Heidegger
would say: as a mode of being or Stimmung and Befindlichkeit (kinds of a tune-

ment). Physically and spatially we are amidst the Dasein as a certain actor ego, but
when we start to exist our being is seen with different eyes and heard with different
ears; it becomes significant by the fact that we compare it to the transcendental
value or idea. In such a moment of existing, the Dasein experiences either a trans-
ascendance, as Jean Wahl put it – it becomes illuminated with the fullness of
transcendence and its significance – or it undergoes trans-descendence, a plunge
into emptiness. Dasein is filled altogether by the transcendence surrounding it.
Our transcendental metamodality can well be in contradiction with the modalities
of our Dasein. Our knowing concerns only empirical being; it is mere Wissen;
whereas the transcendental knowing would be Kennen to use the terms of the
Lithuanian-Finnish philosopher, Wilhelm Sesemann; that is to say, it is something
subjectively experienced, something interoceptive, not exteroceptive. Paradoxic-
ally, transcendence does not surround us in our Dasein as a physical space, as a
kind of space beyond the limits of Dasein. Rather, it opens within us. It is thus a
manner by which the surrounded reacts to the surrounding, just as in the closing
scene from Faust that I quoted above. Our will strives for desirable objects in the
Dasein in order to possess them; it strives for conjunction – which may presup-
pose the disjunction of those objects from others, since we are living in the world
of competency. By contrast, our transcendental meta-will is wanting tinged by
the existential experience, for instance, in artistic creation, scientific research, or
ethical service (Kundry’s “Dienen, Dienen”). There is truth in what John Cage once
told Daniel Charles, namely, that there is poetry as soon as we notice we do not
possess anything!
The subject does not want anything in a dyadic but triadic relationship. What
is involved is not only subject and object, but subject, object AND some presign
or postsign, which as an enunciant or as an interpretant filters our experience
of act-sign. According to Peirce, the most primitive pragmatic relations of life are
dyadic, like the brute facts of desire; they become semiotic only in a triadic sign
relationship. This holds true in existential semiotics as well. The third element
which enlightens subject and object, ego and its surroundings, or that part of the
surroundings which he wants or which serves as the object of his care (Heidegger’s
Sorge, Greimas’s vouloir, i.e., will) is precisely the transcendental idea or value,
the conceiving of which is a metamodal activity. What then happens in us when we
start to exist or experience our Dasein in the light of transcendence? The analysis
of our existential moments can help us clarify the nature of transcendence, and
the best means for this is certainly art.
In existential semiotics, the terms Umwelt and subject adopt a quite new and
special meaning. Umwelt is, so to say, purged of its rough empirical content, and
in this context the speech of ecosemiotics in a practical sense is perhaps mislead-
ing. Still, the idea fits well here insofar as ecosemiotics includes the critique of
language and use of language or of sign in the negative sense, as a pollutant of
environment. A semiosphere can be destroyed or polluted not only by the fact
that a culture decides to eliminate certain texts, but also, as Heidegger said, by
the fact that our public being in the world sinks into the being of anyone at all in
das Man. This is exemplified by average ways of being, by gossiping, and other
negative phenomena whereby our environment is polluted. According to Nöth, if
our signs were basically anthropomorphic and therefore we were responsible for
them, this would lead us into a kind of mental ecology. He says: No one can deny
that our semiotic Umwelt would be conceptually and ideologically as distorted
and polluted as it is visually and acoustically. So our subject has to admit that
the Dasein enlightened by transcendence does not look beautiful at all. How this
is the case becomes evident by the growing experience of our subject. But how it
should be, becomes clear by how the subject conceives of transcendence and how
he can adjust his Dasein according to its measures.
At the end of Goethe’s tragedy Faust is an old man, but even though he is
blind, he thinks himself progressive. But he errs when he believes that sounds of
hooks, by the lemurs and Mephisto, are noises of the labour by which he prepares
a place for future generations. There is deep irony in the fact that, in reality, they
are digging Faust’s grave. But that is something he does not know, since thereafter
the reader or spectator is truly moved into transcendence, in which a choir of
mountain spirits – which no longer inhabit any concrete place or environment –
closes the drama. Faust believes that he hears within himself the voice of tran-
scendence, but his inner “light” is an illusion – from the viewpoint of Dasein’s
modalities, but not in relation to transcendental metamodalities, since the selfish
wanting of Faust has been transformed into an eternal striving and aspiration
which in the end saves him.
6.10 Subject and environment
In closing, I will put together our observations on the environment and subject,
the surrounding and the surrounded, and ask if there is a theory that would “sur-
round” and cover all other theories. Greimas once said, when visiting Canada, to
an unknown Anglo-analytic philosopher: “Your theory is interesting, but are you
aware that you are the surrounded and I am the surrounding?”
As a taxonomy, one can distinguish among nine logical cases of the inter-
relationships of these two categories; they can also be formalized with logical
symbols. I use the symbol S to portray the subject (the surrounded, the center)
and the symbol O to describe the environment, which could be the same as the
6.10 Subject and environment | 129
Greimassian “object”, insofar as the environment constitutes the object of our

subject’s action. O can both mean the Dasein and the transcendence as an envir-
onment or the Uexküllian Umwelt, which even he replaces with the term “object”.
1. S ∧ O The subject has been conjuncted with the environment; i.e., there is
harmony between them. The subject is a part of its environment and has not
yet been separated from it (consider someone that has lived his whole life in
a village community characterised by organic solidarity, in which all the sub-
jects and tools are in their proper place, as in a kind of Heideggerian utopia).
Or the subject has regained his lost fatherland, patrie perdue, found unity
with his environment, and returned into his correct isotopy.
2. S ∨ E The subject has been disjuncted from its environment; the subject is
separated from its milieu. Between him and the environment a friction pre-
vails; the surroundings are something else, a disorganisation, an Other, and
the subject does not belong to it in any way, like the Arab princes in Mont-
esquieu’s Persian letters in Paris or like a modern building interjected into an
historic environment.
3. S → E The subject wants, strives for and towards his environment; he tries to
become assimilated with it, become like it.
4. S ↔ E The subject wants to be detached from its environment, to grow free
of it, to distinguish itself from it.
5. S ≠ E The subject is indifferent to its surroundings. The subject may have
totally abandoned his surroundings or never been a part of them. It wants
to live on its own terms and under its own conditions. There is no communic-
ation between subject and environment, yet they live side by side, apparently
peacefully, like certain minorities in their main culture.
6. S The subject has no environment; it is alone in this world; the environment
has been excluded. The subject is viewed as completely disjunct from its con-
nections to any outer contexts; this is like a sender of message without a re-
ceiver.
The structuralist study of “text” proceeded in this way, believing that in this
way one reaches the zero point required by objectivity. But it is hard to imagine
such a subject as other than an isolated object in a laboratory; perhaps in a
certain mental state an autist subject lies without contact with his environ-
ment, as happens with certain patients discussed in clinical cases.
7. E The mere environment, without any center. For instance, network models
are like that. They have no central point, but they are omnipresent; an empty
space could be thought in this way.
8. S =→ Y The subject tries to dominate its environment, to subordinate the sur-
rounding to its power, to elaborate and mould it according to its modalities.
The subject creates a semiosphere suitable for itself. Some rulers even want to
dominate transcendence; they do this by their mythologies, in which they are

represented as protagonists of mythical narration in order to legitimize and
absolutize their power, as occurs in Rubens’s paintings of the regime of Maria
di Medici.
9. S ←= Y The environment dominates the subject. The subject is subordinated
to the dictatorship of conditions, which he feels he has no power to influence
or change. Such a case is given by a subject directed from the “outside”, one
whom ideologies, propaganda, and other means of manipulation utilize as
their target.
|
Part II: Doing: Society and Culture
Chapter 7
Semio-crises in the era of globalisation:
Towards a new theory of collective and
individual subjectivity
7.1 Introduction
It is certainly a truth that the present situation in the world is something much
embarrassing any thoughtful mind when we try to make sense of recent devel-
opments. This is a challenge for semiotics which has always aspired towards a
universal theory. When looking at the human condition particularly in the era of
globalization with all its threats and promises we must agree that we are in the
Foucaultian sense most obviously in a state of new configuration of our know-
ledge.
We have to note also with ambivalent emotions how well semioticians have
prophesized and anticipated what has happened. Do we not have the feeling that
with all the time increasing control in every respect of life we are going towards
Foucault’s panopticon model? When looking at the internet communication we
have to admit how right Jean Baudrillard was for a long time ago, when he spoke
about the electronic bubble world, an ecstasy of communication, etc. In the prag-
matic sense, it has been proved that semiotics is the theory of our present world
and even being always two or three steps in advance to the contemporary. But
if this is true then we must not stop our theorizing and efforts to elaborate new
structures and models which would help us to understand better the world in
which we are living- and when it is going wrong, to improve, correct it. Semiotics
has had in all its phases at least hidden an emancipated function.
The theme of one of our semiotic events at the ISI in Imatra – Power: visible
and invisible – manifests these trends, and we are pondering not only all forms of
invisible and symbolic power by which we are dominated, but also how man can
be liberated from such dominations.
So the question is: If the world has become globalized and all political de-
cisions in daily life are ultimately motivated and justified by the adaptation to
global economic and social effects, how can such a global force exercise such a
universalized power upon man’s behaviour? It is evident that traditional organisa-
tions are shattering: we hear it all the time said that this and that must be changed,
it cannot be done any earlier, we have to adapt to new demands of efficiency, there
must be more and more control of the quality of the results, more and more results
with less and less costs, etc. How are these arguments allowed to exercise their
134 | 7 Semio-crises in the era of globalisation
limitless power? At least many feel we are in a crisis, and I would like to add: we
are in a special kind of crisis, which I would call a semiocrisis.
Nationalisms seemed to have become at least in the European Union – and in
all kinds of nations united, merely what I would call picturesque regional qual-
ities, which can be enjoyed as tourism, but which no longer perplex and agit-
ate our minds seriously. What then about regionalisms or localities? Most agree
that Europe is after all nothing but localities which are the cross points and ful-
cra of identities or collective subjectivities. To be a European is to be local. But
one cannot become a European by travelling in all corners of it and trying to
adapt via this type of tourism to its various ambiances. So: Marcel Proust was not
French but citizen of XIV arrondissement, Boulevard Haussmannian, or Faubour-
gian. Goethe was not German but Weimarian. Wagner was not German but Rigan,
Triebschenian, or Bayreuthian. Dostoevsky was not Russian but Petersburgian.
Albeniz was not Spanish but Andalusian, Almerian, Sevillan. Pablo Neruda was
not Chilean but Isla Negraan. Peirce was not American but Milfordian. Neither was
Sebeok American but Bloomingtonian or ‘Hoosier’ as they say. I do not believe that
the local environment from which art works or great thoughts emerge would be
indifferent regarding their contents. What I would call ‘ecoform’ of such a work
stems from these roots; this means the adaptation of the work to its particular
physical and spiritual environment.
But if nationalism is thus positively questioned by the emphasis on regional-
ism, even more both nationalism and regionalism are questioned by globalisation
effects. So we are obviously in a crisis.
7.2 The lesson of semiocrises
How to determine what is a semiocrisis, what are its symptoms, what is its con-
ceptual basis? Semiocrisis is due to the changes of epistemes in a culture.
Epistemes are as Michel Foucault once defined them, depth level mental en-
tities which change very slowly. Hence, when they undergo a transformation they
can be metaphorically called earthquakes caused by shifts of continental plat-
eaus.
Earthquakes can be to some extent anticipated but, when they take place
exactly speaking, no one can tell. The conceptual orientations of a culture’s
deep level also move as slowly as continental plateaus. A semiocrisis emerges
when these epistemic levels start to move. This becomes manifest when the
prevalent discourse in a society does no longer correspond to the epistemic reality.
The speech is not equal to man’s situation. Such a discrepancy between man’s
speech and the values steering the epistemes at the deep level of a culture, causes
7.2 The lesson of semiocrises | 135
what can be called intracultural misunderstanding (NOT cross-cultural ones as

Walburga v. Raffler-Engel once argued) or what the French philosopher Vladimir
Jankélévich called by the term ‘méconnaissance’, miss-knowledge.
For instance, even if all the unemployed people would gather to manifest-
ations in millions in front of government houses of various countries, nothing
would happen. Their speech is not heard. The values to which they resort seem to
have vanished, or the dominant values seem to inhabit elsewhere, unreachable
and exercising their power from there. But then suddenly a semiocrisis erupts.
In general semiocrisis means that the visible, observable signs of social life
do not correspond to its immanent structures. Signs have lost their isotopies, their
connections to their true meanings. Benevolent media try to improve the situ-
ation, return to the stable good times before the semiocrisis. But this does not help.
Even media is powerless in front of this phenomenon. As said, such situations can
be forecasted but their exact timing is impossible. Accordingly, when the value
isotopies of a culture start to move, they cause semiocrisis. It is as if under the
surface of the everyday reality there would loom a kind of sociokinetic energy
field, which can combine things in unexpected manners. Just these changes in
such a socio-energetic level are recognized as semiocrisis.
When old structures falter man is left in a structureless situation in which
they are no longer protecting him. This again can have two consequences: either
man then becomes aware of him/herself as an existing subject – as it happened
in Europe after World War II. Man experiences the Sartrean Nothingness; man
unexpectedly encounters the emptiness and becomes conscious of his/her situ-
ation, choice and responsibility/solidarity. This is one way to react to the epistemic
earthquakes recognized as semiocrisis (may be also my new theory on existential
semiotics to which I shall come back later could be explained as a manifestation
of the semiocrisis in the 1990s and 2000s).
Nevertheless, a more common reaction is to reject the Nothingness and resort
to old values until the last moment, by misunderstanding, ignoring the signs of
a semiocrisis. Hence a mythological behaviour enormously increases under such
times. Mythical longing, nostalgia for perpetual myths, of a nation or tradition
are emphasized. When the experience of nothingness under semiocrisis becomes
unbearable man creates himself a symbolic surrogate in the media world and its
phantasmagorical products.
In the Marxist sense, one could say that semiocrises are after all nothing but
the phenomena of ‘falsches Bewusstsein’, i.e., the cases in which man’s conscious-
ness does not equal to his reality. But the danger, of course, lies in the problem
who has the right to tell to another: your speech represents false consciousness.
Or, to put it in a Hegelian manner, who decides which victims of cunningness of
the reason are. Theoretically speaking what is involved is the reference of signs,
to which signs and speeches are alluding. If they refer to each other like mostly
in the discourse of media – then we reach the reality behind them only in the
moments of semiocrisis. In this sense they display a positive aspect: they are like
‘hermeneutic windows’, moments of rupture. One becomes in such a moment
aware of the reference of the signs and of the difference between his discourse
and epistemes.
Therefore semiocrises are excellent lessons of semiotics. This was already no-
ticed by Charles Morris when he said that as we become conscious of our stomach
when it does not function normally, in the same manner we become conscious
of our signs in their disorder. But we cannot stop here: How can we clarify the
situation of semiocrisis? How can we survive it, or What Do We Have to Do, like
Leo Tolstoi asked over one century ago? The collective memory of a society or com-
munity can help us here. It can reveal and remember previous analogous cases in
their history. These help us see what might have happened.
Suddenly the important counterpoints of social life become crucial, which
under normal conditions remain under the massive roar and rumble of world
history. They are found in the marginal, in places where one would least think
they would be. They are like answers which in order to he heard need the major
theme. But they are never blended with it. Such counterparts can provide kinds of
intellectual moments of innovations, revelation. Amidst a semiocrisis which has
pursued a leap from nothingness to creation of a new meaning, a new semiotic
identity may manifest. Whether such voices and counterparts can ever be made
heard via media is a problem of its own. Media of course tries to maintain a crit-
ical discourse. It is represented by specialists. They may be right but when their
opinion is distributed via global media, the medium becomes message.
Whatsoever opinion becomes thus a social power under the conditions of
global bubble world, even when the specialist or critic would deny it or withdraw
from such influences. Criticism becomes power; not on its own, but upon other
criteria no longer under its control.
So, here is a short theory of semiocrisis. However, this may still sound rather
programmatic like any discourse aiming for improving the world or pointing out
which moral responsibilities are tended to sound. Easily such a speech is no
longer semiotics, but a sermon. If we want to make a true semioethics, as Ponzio
and Petrilli suggest, we have to continue our reflections.
Therefore we have to go further and analyze the situation still more in depth.
In fact without a theory of subjectivity, to my mind we cannot get very far in our
analysis of ‘condition humaine’ of globalized world. Such a theory can evidently
have two faces: one looking at collective subjectivity or identity, which we could
also nominate with the somewhat outdated concept of world view – and indi-
vidual identity. In the latter case we can join to the theory I have tried to elaborate
during decades already, existential semiotics. Of course the existential aspects

fit well with individual issues; often existential is thought to be a category of one
solipsist self or subject. It is true I have not yet expanded my theory very efficiently
towards the social realm. But I shall show you later how a door is opened in that
direction in some new issues of semiotic identity.
7.3 Collective subjectivity or identity as a world view
Is the concept of world view a semiotic one at all? For the first it evokes the Belgian
literary scholar, once called a genetic structuralist, Lucien Goldman and his stud-
ies in French collective mentalities in the 17th century (I refer to his study Le Dieu
caché 1955, on Racine and Pascal). Goldmann studied world views and said that
they were determined by three relationships: man’s relation to himself, man’s
relation to others and man’s relation to nature. But are his definitions still valid?
Man’s relation to himself doubtless leads us to the concept of subjectivity. Without
a theory of subject it is impossible to speak about man’s existence. I shall take this
issue again later. Man’s relation to others? Can it be studied semiotically? Certainly
theories like Greimas’s mythical actant model would be suitable to scrutinize at
least stereotypes in the world of social interaction.
One can for instance easily imagine various types of communities according
to which aspects of such a mythical communication they stress, destinator; des-
tinatee, subject, object, helper, or opponent and which kind of action and by which
kind of modalities take place among them.
Man’s relation to nature has lately undergone a ‘modern’ biosemiotic inter-
pretation. This means that a world view is a kind of Ich-Ton, Me-Tone or principle
which determines which signs an organism accepts from its surroundings corres-
ponding to its identity, and which ones it interprets alien and to be rejected.
World-view thus serves as a kind of filter between the environments and the
‘self. The theory could be even extended in the direction of existential semiotics
by presuming that such a filter also selects which ideas from transcendence are
finally realized in the Dasein of an individual or community.
Therefore on the basis one could try to ‘update’ Goldmann’s theory in order
to build a new theory for the need of our time and situation. Nevertheless, what
might be important to notice here is that a world view is not a First, it is always
inferred from signs, symbols, gestures, mimics, postures of a body, etc. It is some-
thing more stable and invariant behind the immediate sense data, it is a principle
which guides these signs of the surface level. But at the same time, there is no
doubt that it would not be also something evidently present.
For instance, the British writer Nancy Mitford spoke about U-language and
non-U-language; the first one represented the language spoken in the British up-
per classes. But her starting point was an essay published in Helsinki in the Bul-
letin of Neophilological Society entitled “Upper Class English Usage”, which also
contained a list of vulgar expressions and their correct U-language counterparts:
for instance: U-language: civilized, non-U-language: cultivated; U-language: Have
some more tea? Non-U-language: How is your cup? U-language: vegetables, Non-
U-Language: greens; U-language: sick, Non-U-language: ill; U-language: What?
Non-U-Language: Sorry! or Pardon – when one does not hear what the other per-
son is saying, etc. Mrs. Mitford supposed that such verbal signs – like also the
accent – immediately revealed to which world view the person belonged.
Stuttering was an undeniable sign of belonging values of British upper class,
the top of refinement, just like the aunt of Marcel Proust could from one phrase
distinguish whether the performer of Beethoven’s Sonate pathétique had taste
or not. These examples only try to show that world view is also something very
concrete, although nominally they are recognized by their narrativisations.
In semiotics Charles Morris again tried to create a typology of world views
on the basis of a few principles of a living organism. In this sense his theory had
a somewhat biologistic tinge. These basic movements were ‘towards’, ‘against’
and ‘away from’ leading to identities characterized as dependence, dominance
and detachment, which appeared in every world view under various dosages. He
called such cases as Dionysiac, Apollonic, Buddhist, Islamic, etc. The first men-
tioned dichotomy Dionysiac/Apollonic stemmed of course from Nietzsche. In fact
the 19th century Romanticism created the manner of looking at the world through
dichotomies. It was then typical to juxtapose various European cultures.
In the novel by George Sand Consuelo, the story of an artist, she portrays two
cultural spheres: the Italian or Mediterranean, which was based upon sensuality,
corporeality, passion, direct action and expression – and the German which was
something spiritual, metaphysical, introvert, inner, intimate, oriented towards
history and mythology. These world views were depicted via the adventures of the
soprano singer Consuelo first in Venezia and then in Austria and via her two lovers
Anzoleto and Albert. Later, how often we encounter categories: die Germanen and
die Lateiner in German philosophy. Ultimately, this conflict between civilisation
and culture exists in aesthetics and many arts. In cultural semiotics such conflicts
were universalized by Yuri Lotman as a kind of universal ‘law’ of culture’s func-
tioning: culture is always surrounded by the sphere of non-culture with which it
is in a dialectic interaction, which it not only tries to oppose, reject or conquer but
which it always needs for its own survival and maintenance. And in our time we all
know theories by Professor Huntington on the dash of civilisations, between West-
ern and Arabic world. Or lately between Spanish-speaking and English-speaking
worlds in the United States. All these cases are exemplifications of theories of
world views or collective identities.
Therefore in the first place world view evokes something sociological – it is –
like Pierre Bourdieu put it – a habitus, community and thus labels the notion as a
phenomenon of collective mentalities. In fact we had in Finland a research project
entitled Identity and Locality in the World of Global Communication – and which
lead into a symposium at Imatra, whose papers have already appeared as a fairly
extensive special issue of Semiotica. The idea of this project was to clarify how
our world view has changed from what it used to be earlier. As a background
observation one could notice that one does not at all live in all corners of the
world in the globalized reality of Baudrillardian ‘bubble’ world, but some soci-
eties still preserve even fairly archaic forms of life. The essential problem thus
was whether these earlier forms of life, culture and languages, and their world-
views could still survive in the new situation. The problem of the contemporary
man was already once well formulated by the Italian semiotician Gino Stefani by
saying that one has to be able to communicate globally but at the same time pre-
serve the locality. Another Italian philosopher Augusto Ponzio has spoken about
the overlapping structures of communication-production in which the commu-
nication chain sender–message–receiver is identical with the production chain:
production-exchange (circulation, markets) and consumption, with all its ideo-
logical implications. In the semiotic terms we can speak of three stages of a so-
ciety: ethnosemiotic or archaic society still living in the state of folklore and
ancient, traditional forms of social life, sociosemiotic society which is the one
of industrialization, formation of nations, institutions, and other forms of ‘mech-
anic’ solidarity (Durkheim) and technosemiotic society which is the one domin-
ated by the electronic means of communication, computers, the global ‘bubble’
world of media to use the somewhat critical terms by Jean Baudrillard. The prob-
lem of the contemporary world – in this most general level – is to unite these stages
within one present society into a peaceful cohabitation. One can presume that
man/woman is happy only if he/she is able preserve something from each level.
Instead when one is shifted from one stage to another, this may create phenomena
called semiocrises in which the prevailing forms of communication and signi-
fication prove to be unsatisfactory, not corresponding to the transformed reality.
The problems also rise by the efforts to return back from a stage to a previous one
since the development is obviously irreversible. Moreover, crises may stem from
the efforts of one stage to be ‘absolutized’ at the cost of others. We may also see
how some major themes of our ‘semiotic’ lives undergo transformations through
these stages, for instance as follows:
Figure 7.1: Three stages of society
The major categories, ‘symbolic forms’ (Cassirer), of man are thus contextualized
and temporalized, so to say, in this general outline of three-stage-model of societ-
ies. It may ultimately seem that semiotic models themselves are a typical product
of the sociosemiotic stage, whereas the technosemiotic phase yields its own re-
ified notions of theoretical discourse (supposing that theories as well are ‘social
constructions’, see Berger, Luckmann). The previous scheme is of course also re-
lated to Charles Morris’s typology of discourses. Its parameters (on the left side
column) are stemming from various semiotic schools, however, presumed to be a
kind of ‘universals’ or philosophical bases for analyzing the events in the concrete
societies under the process of transformation from one stage to the other (like
Lévi-Strauss, Greimas, Barthes, Lotman, Eco, Morris, Peirce, Heidegger, Uexküll,
etc.). What is the impact of the media world on the previous stages of social life? In
some European regions people refuse any ‘modernisation’ of the life, fearing that
their archaic, mythical world would by it disappear. Societies which have reached
7.4 Individual subjectivity or the fight between two manners of ‘being’ in the world | 141
the sociosemiotic level, doubt the effect of global media to the very notion of
subjectivity, democratic institutions, sense of history, nationalism, regionalism in
their institutionalized forms. It seems as if messages by becoming media messages
would lose their original weight and cogency and turn into a subordinated part
of media discourse. Thus the technosemiotic level is viewed as a threat to local
identities. At the same time, no one can deny its benefits, in, for instance, how in
the information society knowledge and communication have become accessible
to anyone participating to the new forms of communication. However, some doubt
the connection of technosemiotic forms with the ideologies of efficiency and pro-
ductivity (Ponzio emphasized a.o. the principle of diritto all’infunzionalità as the
basic human right). So the problem is: Which kinds of narratives would make the
balanced coexistence of those three levels possible for a present society?
7.4 Individual subjectivity or the fight between two manners

of ‘being’ in the world
What we have tried to do above is a rather pragmatic approach to the prob-
lem of semiocrisis and world view. But now when I rethink the idea of three
consecutive world views as continuous phases of development, there is some-
thing familiar. It namely evokes, among many others thinkers the existential
philosopher Karl Jaspers and his early work Psychology of Worldviews (Psycho-
logie der Weltanschauungen). He also provides a typology of various worldviews
having as their background a series of dichotomies as their ground: they are
subject/object, nature/spirit, nature/culture, being/thinking, outer/inner, de-
termination/freedom, sensible/intelligible, etc. In his view from the world view
to be experienced concretely here and now a series of three world views unfold:
nature- mechanic, nature-historical and nature-mythical. When they are seen as a
continuum, one can see how from nature-mythical emerges the nature-historical
and ultimately the nature-mechanical, In fact he meant fairly the same as above
we intended to say with the three stages of ‘semiotic lives’: archaic, social and
technological. He has a lot of critical comments on the nature-mechanical world
view – our technosemiotic one, but could not of course in the 1920s foresee that
variant of nature-mechanic worldview which is now globally indeed everywhere.
Nature is deprived of its qualities and soul. It is interpreted as exact laws, thus
calculable and manipulatable. Nature becomes a tool, there is nothing of the
reality or fullness we normally find there but what prevails therein is a special
unreality, whereby one can obtain most impressive effects. Nature is spatially
and temporally totally subordinated to us. The satisfaction of this world view
is the greater the more the phenomena discovered by it blend together with it,
i.e., they become measurable. Results can be guaranteed in advance, they can
be confirmed by tests, when we have a constant interaction between theory and
measurable facts. When this world view has taken the power, it is distributed
everywhere. Mechanical analogies explain life, human societies and states.
Individual subjective life is explained as an analogy with the physico-chemical
discourse. As a contrast to it we have the nature-historical worldview, which looks
after concrete types and not theoretical laws. A morphological instinct leads it.
But even behind it looms the third and most original world view, the nature-
mythical, to see the world is to experience it. There is a kind of sentiment of
proximity with the nature, it expresses itself via analogies, symbols, spirits and
myths. The mythical world view can, however, also take nature as chaotic and
evil. It is a world of fear. But it is a living entity, albeit with demonic and magical
elements. One could think that a kind of principle of solidarity prevails there on
the basis of a pre-established harmony between nature and other subjects. In
nature-historical phase such solidarity would appear as the normative category,
and by getting into other persons’ destiny by feeling and observing him. Instead,
in nature-mechanical world view all solidarity is dead.
A German semiotician Guido Ipsen has pondered the concept of solidarity and
proposed that it disappears the more equal and well-to-do nations becomes, solid-
arity is of course possible by transgressing the boundaries of the alien psychic,
and one way to do it is to presume a third principle or entity between me and you.
Yet, Jaspers notes that all these phases can be unified in one person and make
a synthesis. A balanced personality is the one in which they are living side by
side – like in our model we supposed that happiness is based on the acceptance
of all three phases from archaic to technosemiotic one. However they tend to be-
come absolutized; philosophical world views are regretfully in a constant struggle
with each other and err in their mutual misunderstanding. Goethe fought against
nature-mechanical view. Tolstoi against nature-historical, in favor of the archaic.
Ecological movement and attack parties fight against technosemiotic world view.
The fight of world views is initiated when one of them is absolutized at the cost of
others. As such, they are contemplative, but they produce also their analogous
modes of action, modalities of pouvoir, ‘can’. At the end Jaspers launches the
psychic-cultural worldview, as the basis of psychic-mythical narratives. Many nar-
rative schemes stem from archaic phases but the neo-oral technosemiotic phase
utilizes them as its raw material to dominate masses of receivers in the mediation
processes. It is doubtless clear that semiocrises originate from this source of world
view crises. Now we face the problem – having been lead to the roots of individual
identity and subjectivity – how we could analyze it in the context of philosophy
and semiotics. I shall next ponder this most essential phase on the ground of
existential semiotics. I shall not give here the principles of this new approach
7.4 Individual subjectivity or the fight between two manners of ‘being’ in the world | 143
to the epistemology of signs, but it is sufficient to note that it is largely based

on the dialectics between Dasein (Being-There) and transcendence. The concept
of Dasein of course sounds somewhat Heideggerian, but in this theory it is not
accepted just in his sense.
Chapter 8
Ideologies manifesting axiologies
8.1 Introduction
In the history of semiotics the concept of ideology occurs in many contexts, but
its weight greatly varies with different scholars and periods. It was considered a
big step forward when once upon a time the Russian Formalists, and after them
the Prague structuralists, concluded that the relationship of a sign to the society
which produced it was not causal but arbitrary. The sign was not a direct index of
its sender, whether latter was a community or an individual person.
The sign becomes ideological via its enunciator. For Bakhtin, an “ideolo-
geme” was the utterance of a protagonist of a story (see Nöth 2000: 413–417).
Particularly in Dostoevsky this appeared as a “polyphony of consciousnesses”.
When two persons engage in discussion, it reveals their different ideologies
(see Bakhtin 1970). The idea of the autonomy of sign naturally distinguished
semiotics from Marxism. But then came the 1960s and ideology came back to
some extent with structuralism, not in the vulgar Marxist sense, but influenced
by the more hermeneutical Frankfurt school. In Adorno, ideology is a central
negative definition, and positive when a “progressive” artist consciously takes
a critical approach to his society. When semiotics developed into a discipline
in the1970s there were still remnants of ideology in the debate. Roland Barthes
paralleled ideology and myth (Barthes 1957), Lucien Goldmann connected it
with his notion of vision du monde (Goldmann 1956), and Greimas mentions
ideology in his structural semantics (Greimas 1966: 181), which was, however,
most particularly an application of his mythical-actantial model. Then ideology
faded into the background until it again became pertinent in the post-structuralist
period, most notably under the impact of Foucault and in gender theories.
Perhaps the best-known definition of ideology is the one that defines it as
“false consciousness” (falsches Bewusstsein). From this point of view an ideo-
logical utterance is one that tries to mask its own axiological starting points, to
justify and universalize them with some myth to deceive the receiver, or by pos-
tulating one’s own values as if they were “natural”. Ugo Volli defines ideology
as “a set of discourses that constitute common sense, transformed such that that
which is partial and open to change is taken to be something universal, unchan-
ging and eternal – in short, reality” (come insieme di discorsi che, costituendo il
senso comune, trasforma ciò cheè parzialee aperto al cambiamento, in qualcosa
di uniservale, immutabile ed eterno, insomma nella realtà) (Volli 2000: 310). For
semiotics, however, nothing is just natural. For example, in Greimas the very no-
tion of the “natural world” already represents a semiotized world, furnished with
significations.
In speaking of ideology, it is typical that one supposes that what is involved
are others, not me. Hence ideology is essentially an egocentric type of utterance.
For instance, Americans said that the USSR was characterized by ideologizing
everything, whereas their own world was something real. Nowadays it is thought
that global markets are real, and all others ideological. Thus an ideological ut-
terance is something that conceals one’s own ideology, that suppresses it from
consciousness. This is why ideological arguments tend to have a certain fanatical
nature.
According to Terry Eagleton, it is characteristic of ideological statements that
at the same time as they say something, they also contain an untruth (Eagleton
1996: 16–17). For instance, “It’s winning the lottery to be born a Finn!” A saying of-
ten heard in that country, it is a typically ideological utterance, particularly when
a Finn says it. You hear it as a rejoinder when someone criticizes Finnish society,
or when a Finn wants to distinguish Finland as better than other nations. The
essential content in such statements is not the statement itself but the situation
in which it is said: who utters and to whom.
In other words, behind an ideological utterance there always looms a kind
of power position. In post-colonial analysis one speaks of how a “dominant” has
taken langue into its possession and forces the dominated to produce parole only
within certain limits. An ideological art is typically like that. For instance, the
series of twelve huge canvases portraying the reign of Maria di Medici, hanging in
a gallery at the Louvre, represents a characteristically ideological, multifaceted
utterance that legitimates a certain power position of the dominant. Donskoi’s
films about the life of Lenin are typically ideological representations. In them a
mythical-ideological hero is always seen more as a type than as a concrete token.
Iconoclast myth analysis strives to unravel such ideological connotations. In
Barthes’s analyses of modern myths, he situates as their signified the concept of
bourgeois ideology and its hegemony (Barthes 1957). In Barthes’s model ideology
functions in the place of signifié in the mythical sign. The notion of nationalism
is also a typically ideological formation. The music of Sibelius’s Finlandia has an
ideological meaning for the Finns, which cannot be reduced merely to the qualit-
ies of its musical signifiers (Tarasti 2001: 3–13). Such qualities can be interpreted
only by the Finns, it is thought.
Yet, ideologies are open to analysis; something stands behind them, namely
the axiologies of a community. An ideological statement manifests hidden, im-
manent values. From the existential semiotic viewpoint, the difference between
ideologies and axiologies is clear. At first we encounter values which in their
virtual state outside the Dasein are transcendental. When an individual or group
146 | 8 Ideologies manifesting axiologies
adopts some values as its own, then values transform into axiologies, which
constitute more or less compatible collections of values. When ultimately an in-
dividual or a group aims to legitimize its axiologies to other subjects of its Dasein,
those axiologies are transformed into ideologies. Hence ideologies represent a
realized phase of originally transcendental values. They constitute a collective
modalization of Dasein. Furthermore, ideologies function as ingredients of an
identity so that they are stable entities in the world surrounding a subject, i.e.,
inter-subjectively valid and durable. They form certain fixed values, which are
common to various subjects, whether individuals or groups.
Such a definition seems to undermine the old one of “false consciousness”.
Eagleton is particularly unwilling to accept that Marxist view, finding it im-
possible to think that such enormous amounts of people would accept it into
their continuous everyday practices (Eagleton 1996: 12). Unfortunately, just this
can happen. Huge numbers of people live under the emotional impact of media, as
Genevan Professor of Psychology Klaus Scherer has stated (Scherer 2001: 16). For
instance, when crises occur, their causes receive little analysis; rather, the media
dwells on the emotional reactions of quite ordinary people. Typical emotional
states, états passionnels, of the contemporary world are anger, frustration and
rage, since there is no possibility to intervene in events, Scherer said in an
interview in Le Monde (Nov. 23, 2001). This has nothing to do with whether these
emotional states originating from the media were “authentic” endogenic passions
or external ones, which, as Marcel Proust says, keep us for a while under their
power, eventually tire us out, then leave us when our subjective judgment starts
to function again. Media represent the world of Appearance, paraître, expanded
to all corners, behind which is être, the level of Being. Ideology is precisely the
sphere of Appearing.
Althusser remarked that ideology appears precisely in the field of affectivity,
in our smallest gestures and emotions (in Eagleton 1996: 19). On the other hand,
ideology is considered invisible in its omnipresence unless it is made conscious.
How far can man’s behavior, which he thinks to be authentic, endogenic, be ex-
plained by the category of Appearance? The situation is somewhat similar to the
argument of one art historian, according to which the fact that Kandinsky never
mentions nor evokes Japanese art in his writings or in his paintings, can be taken
as the best proof of their Japanese influences. We cannot trust this thesis very far
without evidence.
The Italian semiotician Ferruccio Rossi-Landi (1973) has closely examined
ideology as a hidden yet omnipresent category – what nowadays feminists and
gender theoreticians understand as the “hegemony of patriarchal culture”, or
Foucauldian philosophers as “panoptic”, controlling power system. In his book,
Ideologies of Linguistic Relativity, Rossi-Landi quotes the linguists Sapir and
Whorf, who studied the languages of North American Indians (Rossi-Landi 1973:
29). According to them, languages differ from each other not only by their gram-
mar but also by their world-view. He quotes Whorf: “. . . each language . . . is itself
the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity . . . .
We are inclined to think of language simply as a technique of expression, and not
to realize that language first of all is a classification and arrangement of the
stream of sensory experience which results in a certain world-order . . . ” (Rossi-
Landi 1973: 29).
Hence every language, langue in Saussurean terms, has its own ideology,
which lies hidden in its structures. This is precisely where gender theoreticians
base their thesis on the dominance of the patriarchal canon. On this view, if
there are generative grammars producing surface phenomena (signs) from a deep
structure, then the entire process is by nature ideological and present on all levels.
American radical gender theoreticians claim that if one has a bad ideology, it is
always seen and heard in his/her statements. Man’s identity thus “generates”
inevitably certain ideological statements and signs. This somewhat argumentum
ad hominem thesis would annul the achievement of semioticians since the 1920s
concerning the autonomy of signs.
Perhaps we should assume, less radically, that the serpent of ideology
wriggles in only at some later moment of generation, distorting its mechanisms
into ideologies only on the figurative-narrative surface, but not yet at the funda-
mental syntax. Such an invisible ideology would appear in many levels of the
generative course (Greimas 1979: 179–180; 157–161). Even the basic structures of
meaning in Greimas’s semiotics can be ideological. S1 vs. S2 is an ideologically
loaded distinction, which manifests when one invests it with content such as
man vs. woman, rich vs. poor, Christian vs. Muslim, white vs. colored, old vs.
young, war vs. peace, and much more. The actantial model is super-ideological.
Ideologies also manifest on the figurative level, as in the arts. But is there any
non-ideological threshold in the generation or manifestation, beyond which it
becomes ideological?
Augusto Ponzio considers the manifestation of ideology in signs to be iconic:
a sign that conveys an ideology is somehow similar to its ideology. But he adds
that no sign as such is ideological, but is that way only via some interpreter. “In
ideology the relation between the sign and the interpretant is iconic or abductive.
A person performs a given piece of behavior in a given context with respect to
an ideology that is more or less stable and defined: such behavior is associated
with that ideology by a relation of similarity” (Ponzio 1993: 63). And “if ideology
is always contained in signs, it is always contained by an interpretant and for an
interpreter” (ibid.: 65). Therefore what is involved is an interpretant which has the
indexical power to force one to act according to an ideology, to connect its signs –
be they acts or things – to a certain object, which is the same as ideology. Such
an ideological discoursive practice is exemplified by military discipline, and ex-
pressions in general, as related to war. “efficiency”, “victory”, “loss”, “strategy”,
“tactics”, “balance of power”, “surgical precision”, and so on. All these and more
have been shifted to discourses of economy, technology, and science. When they
still appeared in their original meaning, they were based upon corporeality and
indexical signalling in the army. Now they assume a metaphorical meaning in
their new contexts, where their ideological foundations support the virtues of
society in the global techno-semiotic phase of “efficiency”, “precision”, “take-
overs”, and the like. They become ideological statements, whose task is to pro-
duce certain act-signs or actions.
To some thinkers, ideologies are structures of communication rather than
of signification. Eagleton and Bakhtin take this position, viewing ideologies as
utterances or communication, whereas the other view is that they are hidden in
the grammar. Let us again think of the classical Saussurean model in which sub-
ject A says something to subject B who is facing him (1916 [1995]: 27). As noted
in the first chapter, the space between these subjects becomes modalized dur-
ing communication, and ideology, reducible to modalities, thus manifests in this
space. In an ideological statement we might see the functioning of modalities
Being/Appearing in such a way that an ideological statement conceals a certain
Being under its Appearance; for instance, under the cloak of the mythical. At the
same time, the statement reinforces subject A’s modality of Can, his power, which
is experienced by subject B as Must, which compels him to believe the same as
subject A, or act as A wishes him to do. Of course subject A can be aware of the
fact that he is subordinated by the Must of an ideology, but still he continues to
functioning as the medium of this ideology, like a soldier in the army is disciplined
to obey the ideology that gives the orders.
The only way to break free of this circle is to realize that behind ideologies we
have axiologies and, in the end, transcendental values, to which we can compare
the modal constellations of Dasein and thus notice their relativity. In order to
grasp ideology, one needs a transcendental analysis. But what guarantees that
the tools by which we try to decipher ideological grammar are not themselves con-
taminated by some ideology? The concepts we use to deal with ideology should
be non-ideological. But is this possible? Or is Rossi-Landi right when he speaks
about the relativity of linguistic mechanisms?
Some turn the problem around by developing new methods of analysis. In-
stead of hiding behind a kind of higher-level objectivity, they adopt an overtly
subjective, monological discourse, in which all phases of analysis are reported
precisely and made explicit. Some believe that the bold revelation of one’s own
subjectivity would lead to a more objective result, since such analysis does not
even claim to be non-ideological or objective, but expressly tries to make explicit

one’s own ideologies. Yet, such scholars forget one of the great and unique bene-
fits of being human: the ability to put oneself on a metalinguistic level. That is to
say, we can agree, while conscious about the arbitrariness of our contract, that
with this part of a language and its concepts, we can speak about another part of
language; for example, that part containing ideological statements. In this way,
we do not fall into the vicious circle of omnipresent ideology.
Rossi-Landi, in his Semiotik, Äshetik und Ideologie (1976), has also pondered
how in the arts the so-called realist style emerged as something non-ideological.
Such realism meant a kind of direct, “natural” attitude towards the world, without
realizing that such a view of “nature” was itself a product of history and society
(Rossi-Landi 1976: 105–107). Such a view was common not only in nineteenth-
century arts, but one finds it to be the model inherited by mass media. News
reporters and art critics believe (quite mistakenly) that they are transmitting real-
ity as it is, simply telling the truth, not blinded by “theory” or presuppositions.
In her brilliant study of censorship techniques, the Estonian scholar Maarja
Lõhmus (2002) discusses various forms of information mediation that intention-
ally masks it as ideological designs. Though confined to Soviet media manipu-
lation in Estonia, her models and conclusions are quite open to generalization.
Similarly, when we look at realist paintings by French or Russian artists from the
nineteenth century, we believe we are viewing realistic descriptions, though what
is involved is a construction of reality by certain semiotic devices.
We can distinguish basically two types of utterances: ideological and ideo-
logizing. The latter manifests as an effort to dominate the receiver, or “other”. In
the former case, this power has been already stabilized and is “self-evident”. An
ideologizing statement concerns the Other as a stranger. In it one can distinguish
an ideological tinge in speech; for instance, the British upper-class accent, the
pathetic intonation of the speaker in a Russian movie, or the narrator’s voice in a
Walt Disney film. Yet, as said above, to apply the concept of ideology to another
person or to his/her statement is already as such a reification, an hypostatizing of
this phenomenon.
If one says to someone in such a situation that this or that is ideological or
sounds ideological, it means a relativization of the phenomenon. To join an ideo-
logy to an identity goes even further: ideologies emerge from collective mentalities
and their qualities of Einfühlung. Identity means the stability of a certain actan-
tial and passional state. An ideological statement strives to justify that state by
transforming a certain state or aspect of Dasein into a universal; in turn, a de-
ideologizing statement aims to reducing it back to the categories of time, place,
and actor.
An ideological statement is an utterance that takes something as natural, as

a real state of things, though this is basically an arbitrary value-choice. The pos-
tulate of arbitrariness does not, however, mean the counterpole: a subjectively
narcissistic emotional reaction to everything, as if there were no history, place, or
transcendental values at all. In the world ruled by the ideology of consumption,
everything is decided on the basis of personal tastes and enjoyment. As a case
in point, a teacher once took her class to the opera in Toronto; it was their first
experience of it. Afterward, she asked how they had experienced it, and they
answered, “I liked it” or “I didn’t like it” – as if in a highly sophisticated cultural
text as opera, the only thing that matters is whether one likes or dislikes it, in the
same way as we prefer vanilla ice cream to Coke. This global ideology has even
intruded into schools and universities, which are being forced to “go along with
the times”, where pupils are taken as consumers that enjoy “services” rendered
by their teachers. This is quite different from the view of one French pedagogue,
which encapsulates the classical view of education up until the past few genera-
tions: Schools do not give services to men, they make men (and women).
If one thinks of ideologies as manifestations of axiologies, one can ask
whether certain axiologies are more easily ideologized than are others. Or, is
the ideology only a certain viewpoint of that axiology in a certain situation of
communication? Is the ideology the same as a foregrounded, particularly salient
axiology? If we accept the existential semiotic viewpoint that ideology transforms
transcendental values into values of Dasein, we may ask if concealed, implicit
ideologies change into explicit ones. For instance, the idea of Brecht’s epic
theater was to make visible the hidden bourgeois ideology by de-ideologizing
it, but it was not noticed that this device in turn led to a re-ideologizing practice.
According to Greimas, axiologies and ideologies are distinguished from each
other by their semiotic way of being, namely, whether the values are paradigmatic
or syntagmatic (Greimas 1996: 179). Existentially speaking, in the first case the
values, collectively speaking, remain outside Dasein. In the latter case they take
part in its processes. On the other hand, Greimas refers to the fact that in the deep
level of a generative process, the semiosis, we speak about axiologies, whereas
when we shift to the surface-level, modalizing activities of a subject – his or her
Want, Must, Can, etc. – then we may speak about ideologies.
Another central dictionary of semiotics, the Handbook by Winfried Nöth,
deals with ideology in a broader manner, both as a social system of ideas and as
myth, as sign, and as “false consciousness”. There we find that both Althusser
and Eliseo Verón consider ideology as does Greimas, that is, as a property of the
deep structure, as langue rather than parole (Nöth 2000: 415).
Likewise, semiotics itself is influenced by ideologies, which, however, semi-
otic research tries to neutralize by its own strategies. Semiotics is thus a particular
discoursive activity which is constantly aware of its own ideological nature, and at
the same time freed from it. For Foucault the archaeology of knowledge is the same
as its ideology: values and epistemes articulate and justify certain discoursive
practices in a certain age. By contrast, in Heidegger’s philosophy, ideologies may
be situated within the ontological pre-state, which rules over our existence as its
“pre-understanding” (Vorverständnis). In the next chapter we shall deal with ways
of resisting such pre-states, especially as they exist in the values and epistemes
that grip our contemporary world.
Chapter 9
Semiotics of resistance: Being, memory, history,
and the counter-current of signs
9.1 Globalization and transcendence
When thinking about the contemporary world, most people probably share the
feeling that they are powerless to intervene in its course in any way. “Globaliza-
tion” has served as the theme of many congresses during recent years, by which
is meant a new and particular economic and administrative apparatus that one
has no power to change. People are losing their jobs, and those who are still
employed are forced to work until drawing their last breath – forced, moreover,
by abstract requirements mandated by anonymous senders. All public discourse
has been taken over by a single, unquestioned model, the characteristics and
demands of which are familiar to everyone, since they now exist practically
everywhere. Traditional terms such as “progress”, “development”, “results”, and
“education” are rampantly becoming caricatures of themselves, and serve as a
means of adapting everyone and everything to this new global order: a kind of
supra-individual, collective power, an actor or mentality that forces real persons
to submit to its will.
That force is a completely transcendental entity: an amazing phenomenon
amidst today’s extreme materialism. What has happened is the “naturalization
of transcendence” (Pihlström 2003). Charles Taylor (1989), pondering the exist-
ence of transcendence, has argued that certain real-world behaviors cannot be
reasonably explained other than by presupposing that they manifest something
transcendent. When Sartre’s Transcendence de l’égo (1957) was recently trans-
lated into Finnish, a term borrowed from the business world was used as the
equivalent in the title: the externalization of the ego. The whole habitus and
distinctive life-world of contemporary man appears to suggest the popularity
of transcendence. Even communication is mostly virtual and transcendental. We
read about people who live in a fictional, Internet reality, preferring to communic-
ate mostly with others of the net community, using traces on a computer screen
rather than face-to-face dialogue. The Internet embodies the naturalization of
transcendence.
For a philosopher there is something familiar about all this. If, returning to
Hegel, we replace the notion of transcendence with so unfashionable a term as the
German Geist (spirit), we encounter a completely consistent theory of the course
of our world. In his Philosophy of History, Hegel speaks about Geist, as “abso-
9.1 Globalization and transcendence | 153
lute Spirit”, of which individuals are only tools¹. For him, the concept of Spirit is
no abstraction but an individualized and constantly active force whose object is
the consciousness. Consciousness is the existence of Spirit, its Dasein, which has
become an object (Gegenstand) unto itself. Spirit forms a conception of itself and
produces to itself a spiritual content. It becomes, so to speak, a content unto itself;
it manufactures content about itself. The content takes the form of knowing, but
is in fact Spirit itself. In opposition to Spirit there is matter, which is characterized
by density and weight, that is, by substance. Conversely, the substance of the
Spirit is freedom. Freedom is thus the essential property of the Spirit. Spirit strives
for freedom, for activity is in its essence. Freedom is not based upon quietude,
but rather on continuous negation and eventual eradication of stasis. Producing
oneself, becoming an object to oneself – that is the proper activity of the Spirit.
Here we find a pragmatic view of Spirit: it is something to be realized; it is not self-
existent; it has to be made or created – it must be earned, so to speak. For Hegel
(1917: 35), “Spirit is only the end result of some action” (Der Geist ist nur also sein
eigenes Resultat).
Hegel reasons that man becomes what he has to be only through education
(Bildung) and discipline (Zucht). What he is immediately is only a potentiality (an-
sich-sein), as I have also argued (Tarasti 2004b). A person, unlike an animal, must
make him-/herself into something. He has to earn everything for himself, since
he is spirit and must subordinate the natural or bodily man to it. Hence, spirit is
the result of the subject itself. This Hegelian starting point forms the background
to Norbert Elias’s (1997) theories of how, through civilizing processes, man gains
civilité. Much of Elias’s output consists of juxtaposing the German notion of Kultur
and the English one of “civilization” (Elias 1997: 33–38). Though he has much to
say on those matters, one can condense Elias’s argument as follows: Culture is
content, ideas, and spirit, whereas civilization consists of more or less “mech-
anical” habits, manners, and the like. As musicologist Richard Taruskin puts it,
“Culture is internal, profound, conceptual – and, of course, German – whereas
civilization is sensual, momentary, frivolous . . . that is to say, something French
or Italian” (Taruskin 1997: 251).
1 At the time, Hegel’s Philosophy of History was one of his most popular works, in no small part
because it was relatively easy to read. At the same time, one must remember that it was also one
of his most roundly criticized doctrines.
154 | 9 Semiotics of resistance: Being, memory, history, and the counter-current of signs
9.2 Globalization as the new civilization:

Some signs of the time
Some feel that civilization is a threat to culture. For Elias, globalization is the
new civilization, which expands all over the world, destroying culture in its wake.
Essential is Elias’s assertion that, in a civilized society, no human being enters the
world already, or “pre-”, civilized. One has to undergo acculturation as part of the
socializing-civilizing process. This is nothing other than what Hegel meant by his
claim that Spirit is not a ready-made product, but something to be earned by work
and action.
On the other hand, Elias’s comparison of the as-yet uncivilized children of our
culture with the “uncivilized” adults of archaic societies is misleading (1978: xiii).
Lévi-Strauss (1967) proved long ago the fallacy of such reasoning, in his essay on
the Structures élémentaires de la parenté. Yet, if we interpret Hegel in the context
of our time, casting globalization in the role of the “bad spirit” of world history,
then plainly such a role can be fulfilled only via the Eliasian civilizing process.
Therefore, all processes of globalization put special emphasis on re-educating and
“re-civilizing” people into the new system. To provide a framework for theoretical
reflections to follow later, I next present a list of those “re-civilizing” traits and
processes, as well as some predictions about the condition humaine, especially in
the “global era”:
(1) No more future. The concept of a future is obliterated by an atmosphere
of uncertainty, a fragmented kind of life. Nobody can make long-term plans;
life moves only from one moment to the next. One has to be ready for constant
change, since globalization and competition demand it. What is actually meant
by “change” we are not told.
(2) No more past. No one can resort to history for support, since the new civil-
ization has divorced itself from the “backward” past. The past must be forgotten
actively. The attitude is that of “nous avons changé tout cela”. This history-less
attitude, as a kind of barbarism, was portrayed by the cultural historian Jakob
Burckhardt as early as in the nineteenth century, when he anticipated the triumph
of the “global” type of man (Burckhardt 1951: 13–14).
(3) A shift to the metalevel. In work, intent and product are unimportant.
What matters is the manner of doing, the techniques and technology of getting
things done. This shift is accompanied by the problematization of all phenomena
of everyday life. Nothing can happen by itself: faith in one’s own intelligence and
in Eliasian civilité requires that everything take place on the basis of “research”
and “control” (the new obsession). This mind-set is linked to the principle of min-
imizing risks and maximizing efficiency, which is in turn based on the growing
9.2 Globalization as the new civilization: Some signs of the time | 155
conviction that everything and anything can be anticipated, counted, and ma-
nipulated.
(4) Perpetual assessment of quality in all domains. People and institutions
must undergo continuous self-criticism; at the same time, it is forgotten that the
more energy which one puts into the assessment of quality, the less quality there
is. From this obsession with assessment emerges a system of total control and self-
censorship.
(5) One dominant discourse: Economic-technological. Borrowing its terms
from the military, as mentioned in the previous chapter, this discourse allows
for assessment and discussion only in terms of functionality/non-functionality,
effectiveness/ineffectiveness (see, e.g., Huhtinen 2002).
(6) Only two classes of people: Winners and losers. In this, another extension
of the military metaphor, losers are not worth funding; they are kept silent by con-
tinuous pseudo-education, therapy, and entertainment. This distinction between
the intelligent and the non-intelligent, as kinds of biologically determined en-
tities, is ultimately based on theories of genetics. This classification happens
without one noticing that it is just as irrational as the racist-tinged thought of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries (e.g., eugenics). Though the latter is thought
to have been eliminated, a similar, essentialist doctrine has entered through the
back door.
(7) Elevation of ownership as a goal unto itself. Operating on the principle
that “to possess things is wonderful”, this unscrupulous form of capitalism
equates wealth with honesty; poverty manifests “dishonesty” and is viewed as
one’s own fault. To see that this view is adopted by everyone, police and other
“law enforcement” agencies are developed to new extremes.
(8) The basic emotional moods in society stem from business life. These
moods are greed (to assure continuous profits and results) and fear (continuous
anguish about losing profits and positions), which are expounded and dissemin-
ated everywhere via communications media.
(9) The reservate model of reality. This means the reversion of idea of protec-
ted areas for population under threat of vanishing, namely it refers to the seclu-
sion of “winners” in closely guarded sanctuaries; for example, the walled com-
pounds of urban and suburban “gated” communities. “Losers” live outside the
walls, in areas rife with continuous terrorism and violence.
(10) Symbolic violence. “External” culture spreads to all corners of the globe
by assimilating and destroying “internal” cultures (Finol 2004). Such violence
appears in communication as the supremacy of the spectacle: the penetration of
global values into cultural micro-processes via music, food, cinema, and other
sign systems, along with their attendant behaviors and emotional sates.
(11) Science: Total behaviorism. Everything can be explained by genetics,

biology, and physics. The humanities are minimized and suppressed in favor of
the natural sciences and technology. Only theology remains, and it is for discip-
linary purposes – that is, to keep people in line.
(12) Study is an unnecessary and unpleasant hurdle of life. It has to be
cleared as quickly as possible and with minimal expenditure of energy and funds.
(13) The naturalization of transcendence, as discussed at the beginning of
this chapter.
(14) The Huntington thesis. This idea proposes conflicts at the level of civiliz-
ations, and the transformation of Anglo-Saxon culture by the influx and positive
influence of Latino culture.
Do we, as intellectuals, scholars and artists, want to be a part of such a world?
Can we be part of that world even without wanting to be? Or is membership in such
a world necessary only so as to preserve our jobs, contacts, or group identities?
Many semioticians have started to ponder such questions. In Italy, for example,
Augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli are trying to create a special theory of “semio-
ethics”. The German semiotician Guido Ipsen has pondered problems of solidarity
in the global world. Note to mention the existential semiotics of Landowski and
myself. As noted above, Finol (2004) argues that a new global culture has emerged
which is not only economic but which also intrudes into the microprocesses of
everyday life. (In Lotman’s terms, “outer” culture has invaded “inner” culture
and subordinated the latter completely.) Finol compares such “invasions” to the
expansion of the Roman empire. In Latin America, particularly, this manifests as
the supremacy of Anglo-Saxon culture, as is the case all over the world.
Still, in what Eco called “semiological guerrilla war”, the inner culture can put
up resistance through the use of some very subtle mechanisms. That resistance is
based on the notion of semiotic tension. According to Finol’s model, tension is
created when a body is being pulled toward, or attracted to, two different sides.
A body (cuerpo) can choose either to resist or to adapt, and a balance can prevail
between those choices. If the attraction to culture A is stronger than to culture B,
then adaptation or assimilation occurs; whereas if one actively engages with B,
then what is involved is resistance. In everyday life these tensions become natur-
alized. The attacks by global culture occur on all fronts at the same time; struggle
and tension emerge everywhere, on all micro-levels of everyday life. Finol believes
that elements of an inner culture form the most efficient resistance to threats from
the outer one(s).
In turn, the Bulgarian semiotician Kristian Bankov, in his essay “Infinite Se-
miosis and Resistance”, has used Peirce’s triangle model to ponder the concept
of resistance (Bankov 2004: 175–181). As is known, in Peirce’s theory the semiosis
9.2 Globalization as the new civilization: Some signs of the time | 157
is launched by the so-called dynamic object, which is situated outside the sign
triangle, in “reality”. Bankov illustrates:
. . . let us imagine a car with five people on board. They are urgently trying to arrive at some
destination but on the journey the car breaks down. They all try to guess what caused the
breakdown and propose the easiest way to fix the problem. But there is little time and they
have to reach a consensus, since they cannot try everyone’s solution. At the same time, they
make abductive reasonings about what constitutes the material object that is resistant to
their purposes. A solution is found, the car is repaired, and the resistance disappears. But
then the car breaks down again. Now the passengers start to quarrel with each other. Now
the resistance is of a social nature: they have to reach agreement among themselves if they
want to continue the journey. The dynamic object here is not material but spiritual.
Bankov describes those two species of resistance as either static (independent of

individual intentions) or dynamic. From this he reasons that the nature of resist-
ance is different in the natural and social sciences. This model fits well with Finol’s
insofar as, in philosophy and art, the resistance is provided by the community in
which those disciplines are formed. The idea of infinite semiosis also fits well with
Finol’s theory, in the sense that, without the resistance of the inner culture, the
outer culture increases and expands unhindered, smothering and destroying the
original culture.
Accordingly, semioticians have taken the problem of resistance under exam-
ination. That they have done so is crucial, for in the eventual semiotics of resist-
ance, mere comments will not suffice. Resistance will amount to nothing more
than a sermon unless it has a theory behind it. The issue must first be problem-
atized, as we have done above, and thereafter conceptualized and reflected upon
at a deeper epistemic level. In the end, one must build as systematic a theory as
possible, the principles of which must be popularized, so that it leads to concrete
human actions.
The first step in that direction is a statement that is typically and universally
true of all humans: we are all capable of pursuing the spiritual and pragmatic
operation that one may call negation. Negation is the crucial notion in existential
semiotics. It is also relevant in Hegelian logic, as that which puts the world into
motion. In Hegel, negation is followed by Becoming. But what if we should in-
tervene at this phase in his logic and presume that negation, rather than leading
to becoming, is instead followed by a return backwards? If such concepts as be-
coming, development, progress, anticipation, directionality, and the like have all
been subordinated to serve the global system, and if we want to reject this system
as a whole, then we have to look at the movement of signs in the counter-current
to all of that.
Some of my earlier theories have emphasized the flux of phenomena, their

streaming temporality, in contrast to spatial, achronic examination detached from
dynamic, forward-rushing processes. I have underlined that semiotics is progress-
ive; it is no longer a “post-” phenomenon (postmodernism, poststructuralism,
etc.) but a neo-phenomenon. Yet, we should also take into account a third altern-
ative: the counter-current of signs, a reference backwards – with all its concepts,
such as memory, return, oblivion.
We have to ask, What counts as “progress” in our own time? Or, to recall
Tolstoi’s question, What do we have to do? If all surrounding reality is unaccept-
able, then progress is made not by pushing “forward”, with all the values that
entails, despite the deification of speed and efficiency, but rather by a kind of
counter-movement, a kind of non-progress, the other side of the prevailing es-
tablishment ideology. I do not doubt at all the capacity of semiotics to effect such
a turn. If Adorno could write his Negative Dialectics, then is it not possible to write
a “Negative Semiotics” or a “Semiotics of Resistance”?
9.3 Aesthetics of resistance
The heading of this section alludes to the novel by Peter Weiss (1978), Ästhetik
des Widerstandes, which from an autobiographical perspective portrays events in
Europe on the eve of World War II. The term is used in the domain of aesthetics
and arts, in which “progress” often consists of the rejection of previous styles and
trends, a rejection that occurs in the “hard” sciences, too, as “revolutions” and
“paradigm shifts” in the Kuhnian sense. In the present context, the concern would
be art whose universal quality is to serve as a power of resistance.
In Vladimir Propp’s (1958) now-classic narrative model, the seeking or pur-
suit of an object by a subject-hero has generally been taken as the self-evident
starting point. In Propp’s model, the role of opponent has been reserved for the
antipathetic villain or the like. In the art and science of resistance, the role of the
opponent is now positive, and, in fact, ultimately replaces that of the subject-
actant. In later narratives, he is promoted, from an opponent to the status of a
main actor. There are many examples of this in biographies of marginal artists
that were misunderstood in their time, ranging from van Gogh to the Finnish artist
Aleksis Kivi. Resistance in these cases is of course dictated by the historical situ-
ation, and ironically, the very marginality of the artist lends something universal
to his or her posterity. Weiss describes such resistance as follows:
Die soziale Erneuerung, die Übernahme von Entdeckungen und Eroberungen aus den
Händen der Herrschenden, die Herstellung der eigenen Macht, die Begründung unseres ei-
genen wissenschaftlichen Denkens, dies waren Themen, die wir uns in der Kunst, Literatur,
vorstellen konnten.
(Weiss 1978: 86; English trans. mine)
(Social renewal, the complete take-over of discoveries and conquests arising from the he-
gemony of domination, the establishment of power, the founding of our own kind of sci-
entific thought – those would be the themes that in art [and] literature we can represent to
ourselves.)
When later the narrator of the novel is wandering in a Parisian suburb and finds
himself at the atelier of the painter Géricault, he eloquently portrays the aesthetics
of resistance, using the life and work of that artist as his illustration. He visits the
dilapidated work room which served as the artist’s home in the years 1816–1818,
during which time he created his great oil canvas, Le Radeau de la Méduse (1819).
After traveling to England, Géricault returned to this Parisian atelier, dying there
in 1824. The verbal description of the painting is an art work of its own, a liter-
ary one. Weiss, fascinated by the extreme situation portrayed in the shipwreck,
argues that the painter aimed to put the spectator – whom nobody on the ferry is
looking at – somewhere amidst the melee, as if he were clutching spasmodically
at one corner of the ferry, but already too far gone to expect to be rescued. What
happened above him no longer concerns the spectator. Instead, there is hope for
those who stand in the painting, but who are ultimately condemned. Weiss then
describes various figures in the picture, including their hopes of being rescued.
After that transcendental moment, which is allotted to the African, Weiss
moves into the real historical world of the painting. He conceives the painting as
a fragment of a more extensive narration of Géricault’s life story, since it portrays
the shipwreck which the painter actually experienced. Some of the protagonists,
shown in the painting, indeed found refuge off the coast of Senegal on the Isle of
Saint Louis, then a center for some of the most horrid colonialist exploitation and
slave trading. The English garrison on the island refused to help the Frenchmen,
who at last met up with a Moorish tribe in a land ruled by the king of Zaide.
Luckily for them, the Moors were admirers of Napoleon and showed hospitality to
the starving Frenchmen after they had drawn a map of Europe on the sand. The
king himself had witnessed the pilgrimage of Napoleon’s army to Mecca. Now
the Frenchmen could tell the king that Napoleon had continued to live after his
exile to the isle of Elba. Finally the Englishmen took them into their hospital, but
expected reimbursement in the form of the treasures that sank with the Méduse.
Weiss goes on to compare Géricault’s work to the corresponding painting by
Poussin, which was remarkably conventional and “aestheticizing”. For Géricault
Figure 9.1: Le radeau de la méduse by Géricault
the important thing was the vision, the psychic phenomenon: his painting does
not hold out the promise of safety, which glitters in Poussin. Poussin’s harmo-
nious version evokes a kind of serene devotion, whereas Géricault unhesitatingly
forces the spectator into an anguished dream. Géricault puts us amidst a rush into
the unknown, forcing us to glimpse a passionate, psychic event.
Finally, Weiss tells about Géricault’s own life during those hard years in which
he had lost all hope. Painting had turned into a tool with which he dealt with
his inner obsession – the madness that threatened to overcome him. He who had
portrayed conquered and doomed, had himself succumbed. Weiss states: “But
never later was I so convinced [as in Géricault’s atelier] of how, in art, one was
able to create values which transgressed the being as excluded and lost, and how
by shaping such a vision one could heal melancholy” (Weiss 1978: 30–33). At the
same time, he notices that he was suddenly no longer interested in Géricault’s
life, since the latter “was, in his giving and taking”, says Weiss, still “connected
to universal relationships and bonds that constitute the basis of artistic activity”
(ibid.).
The just-described example of Weiss is an instance of the aesthetics of resist-
ance in both painting and literature. In music, the same qualities appear in the
life and output of composers who go to the core of musical organic process and
turn the course of musical events into a counter-current. The spectral composers
of our time, for example, can use their knowledge and techniques to create sweet
sound surfaces, as do Tristan Murail or Kaija Saariaho in her opera, L’Amour de
loin. Conversely, and using the same resources, the artist can choose to make
music that does not flow pleasingly over the ear; that is, which does not proceed
“organically” but anti-organically, denying the normally corporeal logic of music.
Such is the music by Finnish composer Harri Vuori, in his new symphony and in
earlier works such as Ended Movements (Lopetetut liikkeet).
Such music also exemplifies the artist’s willingness to deny the prevailing
technological sound culture, to take a critical position towards the dominant Ton-
Welt. Also in Finland, Kalevi Aho’s earlier works foreground the aesthetics of res-
istance, for instance, his opera Insect Life, and even more cogently, his abstract
works such as the Triptych Laokoon and Fifth Symphony. Other music of resist-
ance, in relation to its time, includes Magnus Lindberg’s Kraft in the 1970s. Or
one may go even further back in music history, and in this context mention Wag-
ner’s Parsifal, in which time stops and changes into space: when the opera begins
everything has already happened. This was indeed an art of resistance, in reaction
to the militaristic German empire.
On the other hand, resistance does not have to trumpet itself abroad, to be
noisily gestural or Fauvist. It can also appear in smaller forms of music that
present man’s existential situation in miniature, so to speak, in a kind of simple,
tonal language of interiority. Such can be found in the music of young composers
in Finland such as Aki Yli-Salomãki, Jan Mikael Vainio, and Tuomas Laurinen,
and some young composers in Baltic countries. In such cases, negation as res-
istance becomes an artistic gesture that follows upon an existential experience
of the artist. My aim here, however, is to go even further, and on a deeper level
investigate something like the “anti-life” of signs in their counter-current.
Certain types of artists and thinkers stand as models of those who do not go
with the flow of favored modalities, as Stefan Zweig wrote in his Star Moments
of Mankind (1947). In that book he scrutinizes so-called great men, which are
often found to be kinds of culminations of human modalities: Will = rulers and
explorers; Know = artists and scientists (Handel, Rouget de l’Isle); Can = sports-
men, actors; Must = those who do their duty no matter what the cost. A person’s
greatness consists in ascending to the crest of a wave and then riding it. Those
are the celebrated heroes. But there is also a more exquisite type of hero, who
bases his or her deeds upon the human ability of negation by using kinds of anti-
modalities: Not-Can, restraining from the use of force (e.g., Gandhi); Not-Will;
Not-Must; Not-Know.
In Chapter One we outlined Dasein and the transcendence thereof, the jour-
neys of a subject between Daseins, a kind of traveling towards the future, to Dasein
“x” via transcendental acts of negation and affirmation. As noted in that chapter,
our model contains two hidden aspects.
The first concerns negation as a kind of alienation or estrangement.² Namely,
when the subject temporarily exits his Dasein during his transcendental act, he
can stay on this journey for any length of time. It can also happen that, when the
subject returns to the world of his Dasein (symbolized by a globe in Figure 1.2), the
latter will have changed. During the subject’s journey, that Dasein has itself been
in motion, independently of our subject, and perhaps gone in such a direction that
our subject does not return to the same world from which he departed. (Heracles
long ago observed that we do not step twice into the same stream.) Dasein does
not necessarily exist only for our subject nor adapt itself according to his or her
existential experiences. The world may well change course during the subject’s
absence. The subject that returns to a world quite different from the one he left
can either accept and try to adapt to such change, or he can deny it.
As noted in Chapter One, a special situation for semiotics of resistance
emerges from the latter case. Our subject’s theory of the world does not correspond
to it. And as discussed earlier, progress in this case need not mean that one
go along with the change, but instead look at alternatives, at what might have
happened, at what might have been possible. The arrows of Figure 1.3 showed
that things can go backward as well. Our subject recalls his earlier Dasein, and
returns to it via memory, which has retained images and ideas from those previous
worlds.
We earlier noted that he might have forgotten them, and Dasein may have
forgotten him. Danger lurks, indeed, if he dwells too long in his position of resist-
ance and outside the Dasein. We noted that real thinkers of resistance are always
forgotten and suppressed. Nevertheless, we shall advance some ways by which
such resistance might be possible.
9.3.1 Forces of resistance I: Being
As is known, Greimas’s basic modalities are Being and Doing (Greimas 1966). In
Hegel, Spirit is not mere Being but also Doing (action). For instance, if in an ideo-
logical context Being signifies acceptance and even promotion (action on behalf)
of the dominant status quo, then one should find a third modality to portray the
movement backwards. In English there is the verbal expression to undo, which
2 I am grateful to Vladimir Franta for calling my attention to the notion of negation as “estrange-
ment” or “alienation”.
might fit here in its sense of “to cancel”. On the other hand, the semiotics of resist-
ance involves not only abolishing something but also creating and indicating new
content. What might such a new creative activity be if it were directed backwards?
In his Idea of Phenomenology, in the chapter on time-consciousness, Edmund
Husserl speaks about two acts: protention and retention (Husserl 1995). By Being
he means the purely “now”-moment, which, however, is exceeded not only in
protention (reaching toward the future), but also in retention, which preserves
the past. Retention concerns the so-called primary memory, whereby we retain an
experience in our mind long enough to receive it as a totality. Husserl illustrates
this phenomenon with a tone (Bergson and Peirce also used melody as an example
of the immediate recognition of a reality).
Yet, for a scholar who has studied the life of signs as action, as pragmatic
production of codes, merely ontological reflection on being no doubt serves in
itself as a kind of resistance. Such is the case with Kant e l’ornitorinco (Eco 1997). As
a realist semiotician, Eco argues that being exists, or “is”, before we speak about
it. Therefore being precedes discourse; it is something to which we compare our
speech if we want to clarify whether the latter is true or not. Eco’s position is in
principle the same as Peirce’s; that is to say, behind the object is the so-called
dynamic object, which “is” and which “kick-starts” the semiosis into motion. This
idea is paradoxical in the same way as Kant’s Ding an sich: the-thing-as-such pro-
duces sensations in us by causal relationships that are always filtered through
certain categories. But, if we are chained to our sensory categories, then how can
we ever know about what the thing-as-such is, or whether “there” is anything?³
For Eco, beyond these categories and signs something exists that demands to
be heard: “. . . this dynamic object, so to speak, shouts to us, ‘Speak! Speak about
me! Take me into account!’ ” (Eco 1997: 20). From this Eco comes to an ontolo-
gical question formulated centuries ago by Leibniz: Why is there something rather
than nothing? (ibid.: 21). Eco finally concludes, deferring to Thomas Aquinas, that
being is like a horizon or a bath, in the confines of which our thought dwells
naturally. At the same time, he notices that the question of being is not the same
as the problem of the existence of external reality. For Eco, the question of being
comes before any empirical being. Nor can the issue be reduced to a problem of
language; for example, by transforming it into a typical Indo-European language
structure in which a subject is connected to a predicate, in sentences such as “God
exists” or “the horse gallops” put into copula forms such as “God is existent” or
“the horse is galloping”.
3 For more on this Kantian dilemma, see the work of Finnish semiotician of education, Esa
Pikkarainen (2004: 66–69).
The later Eco (1997) has positive things to say about Heidegger, whom he had
criticized negatively in his previous book, Les Limites de l’interprétation (Eco 1992:
59–61). There Heidegger was condemned as a kind of hermetic mystic who postu-
lated that behind every being and word there is some true being, which is visible,
or makes itself so, only to the elect. Yet in Heidegger, being always turns into a
situation in which true Being (Seiende) appears in Dasein, which is nearest to
my own being, and which therefore we cannot speak about except by speaking
about ourselves. (Notice that here the category of subject enters the scene.) Heide-
gger’s thought is, in Eco’s opinion, completely bound up in the German language:
Sein, seiende, Da-sein and so on are all terms of Heidegger’s culture. If Heidegger
had been born in, say, Oklahoma and had found at his disposal only one word
(“to be”), how would that have affected his theory?
The fundamental modality of Being is tinged by its “thrown-ness” (Geworfen-
heit) into the world – flung against its will into some strange place. On the other
hand, the subject is anguished by the limits of being in Not-being or death. There-
fore Being signifies, according to Eco, an existential understanding of the finite
nature of our existence. Eco refers to Vattimo’s interpretation of Heidegger, which
distinguishes between “right” and “left” in explanations of the latter’s thought.
The former emphasizes the return to being as a kind of negative, apophantic and
mystical act; the left, in turn, interprets being historically as a kind of weaken-
ing and bidding farewell to history. The first-mentioned interpretation of being
has often been criticized. Here we have spoken about genosigns, which bear in
themselves their whole development, starting from their emergence as a kind of
iconico-ontological process. What a sign is is the result of its basic Being (Tarasti
2004a: 130–136).
Remarkably, Greimas’s idea of being is very similar. In his veridictory square,
for example, being precedes appearance (manifestation), producing four cases in
their combination. Similarly in Greimas, the beginning of the generative narrative
process is Being, namely, the existing of isotopies on the deep level. I have criti-
cized both models – Heidegger and Greimas – on the basis that Becoming, in the
sense of generation, is not a continuous process starting from basic Being, but
that several breaks, ruptures, revolutions, and rearticulations take place during
the generative course (Tarasti 2000).
In any case, Eco performs a kind of Hegelian experiment: let us suppose the
existence of a kind of Spirit and World. Spirit knows the World and tries to speak
about it: if the World consists of three atoms A, B, and C, then the Spirit may have
three symbols – 1, 2, 3 – with which it names and speaks about the World. In the
ideal case, the names match the symbols, such that A = 1, B = 2 and C = 3. Yet the
Spirit can also act otherwise, connecting its three symbols in numerous ways and
thus producing various manners or languages in which to speak about the World
(Eco 1992: 42–43). Still, Spirit is in a way also part of the World, and so one can
think that World, in its desire to interpret itself, assigns this task to some part of
itself: Spirit can “decide” that a certain, distant part of it exists solely for such self-
interpretation. This idea of Eco is naturally a kind of Hegelian parody, in which
the Spirit is the most important ingredient of the world. At the same time, it also
evokes Lévi-Strauss’s structural studies of the human mind (esprit). If these struc-
tures were present everywhere, then were they not also in Lévi-Strauss’s mind as
he studied the myths of Indians? Mythical thought had thus taken Lévi-Strauss’s
brain to the scene of its being and would interpret itself by it, as he reasons in his
several volumes of Mythologiques. In the end Eco returns, in his experiment with
Spirit and World, to his previously-held idea of iconic signs as transformations
between two entities. The two have a certain amount of similar units, and when
one finds such units to be sufficient, it is said that A is iconic sign of B. In such a
case, we can state that Spirit is identical with World.
Despite his back-tracking, Eco arrives at a category of interest to our study,
namely, the resistance of being. Being resists infinite discourse about itself. Eco
first accepts Heidegger’s argument that being is always my own being as it is
thrown into Dasein. In that state, we sense that our speech about existence has
its limits, of which the extreme is the end of our own being. Moreover, so-called
nature sets limits on our speech. (Here Eco refers to everyday experience of nature
such as day and night, or natural species, in the Darwinian sense.) The existence
of biotechnology manifests such limits, as well.
Eco alludes to the theory of possible worlds and notes that we can imagine
how things might have happened in another way altogether. Still, such reasoning,
for Eco, does not form the basis of our being. He allows that there are spheres in
our being about which we can speak. Nevertheless, and in a diversity of ways,
languages and cultures divide and articulate the continuum of being. All that is
significant, everything which signifies, depends on that articulation. Eco asks,
Could being, in a more metaphysical sense, mean this continuum before its artic-
ulation by culture? In other words, does that continuous “magma” contain lines
of resistance and propensities of flow that prompt us to make articulations in a
certain manner? Without noticing it, he puts the question of existence in terms
of so-called organic meaning: signifying processes that imitate organically the
continua of nature and which would thus be, so to say, universal and natural.
Theoreticians of social constructions and scholars of civilization (such as
Norbert Elias) would certainly hesitate to accept this view. Yet the difference
between the overtly historical view and Eco’s structuralist approach can be
resolved in Hegelian terms, by the fact that these articulations, the segmentation
of continua as described by Eco, can be examined as processes in which the
Spirit gradually realizes itself. The Being of now and today is the consequence
of what was before; all choices among alternatives, among various cultural
articulations, are processes bound with time and history (which need not lead
to the historicizing and relativizing of phenomena, as occurs with Paul Ricoeur).
What is involved is a phenomenon of a deeper level, a phenomenon that has to
be elucidated as the core problem of any historical process and temporality of
signs. For Eco, Being is ultimately something positive, and its denial or negation
is merely a linguistic trick (Eco 1992: 57). Yet, Norbert Elias says the following
about the birth of civilité:
It may perhaps seem at first sight an unnecessary complication to investigate the genesis
of each historical formation. But since every historical phenomenon, human attitudes as
much as social institutions, did actually once “develop”, how can modes of thought prove
either simple or adequate in examining these phenomena if, by any kind of abstraction, they
isolate the phenomena from their natural, historical flow, deprive them of their character as
movement and process, and try to understand them as static formations without regard to
the way in which they have come into being and change?
(Elias 1978: xv)
Steering between what he calls the Scylla of static theory and Charybdis of his-
torical relativism, Elias’s psychogenetic and sociogenetic investigation sets out to
reveal the “order underlying historical changes, their mechanics and their con-
crete mechanisms” (ibid.).
From this point of view, Being, in its static nature, is not the appropriate point
of departure. The only correct epistemic theory would be a model of flux. In Eco,
Being forms resistance to discourse. We cannot develop infinitely our speculations
without deciding whether they are significant to our existence. Perhaps unaware
of it, Eco comes to accept the hermeneutic idea of preunderstanding: the being
which exists before explanation and which makes the latter meaningful. If we, as
Heidegger, accept the idea that Being and Dasein are my Being, then we have in-
cluded the subject. Further, we have discarded our behaviorist-positivist models,
in which our being is made out to be mostly an illusion, in which we are treated
as mere objects. If we reject this theory as one of the ideological errors mentioned
at the beginning of this chapter, we are led to think that a semiotics of resistance
might be sought in this direction.
We can go still further and ask, Is it conceivable that signs and the ha-
bitual, “common-sense” temporal axis might have their own counter-current
(Figure 3.2)? Might this counter-current also constitute resistance to the straight-
forward movement of being as it is supposed to unfold? Very often, and danger-
ously so, certain forms of civilization use myths in order to justify and legitimate
themselves as “natural”. Therefore one has to be careful when speaking about
the natural becoming of signs and about “normal” temporal processes. For they,
too, might be only cultural practices:
le Néant
Dasein
$I¿UPatiRn
Figure 9.2: Temporal axis, showing forward and backward currents
9.3.2 Forces of resistance II: Memory
Memory is one of the fundamental experiences of mankind and one of its historic
themes. All over the world we can follow the traces of mankind in architecture, art,
narration, myths. It is commonly thought that real culture, in the German sense
of the word as interiority and profundity, is based upon memory. Among other
things, so-called living music culture is based upon music that is remembered,
music that stays in one’s mind. (Boris Asafiev referred to that phenomenon with
his concept of memorandum.) When we return home from a concert, for example,
we do not remember all of the music we just heard, but probably only one tune,
which we continue humming. When we listen to a familiar piece of music, previ-
ous hearings of it are evoked by association, and thereby we start to listen to our
own life story, our own history. Or we may be joined to the Hegelian Volksgeist of
the nation: “. . . the conception of spirit which realized history. What a spirit knows
about itself that constitutes the consciousness of a people . . . ” (Hegel 1917: 36).
For instance, when a Frenchman hears the Marseillaise, he participates in the
collective memory of his people. The same occurs when a Pole hears Chopin’s
Revolutionary Étude, when the Italian hears Verdi, and so on.
The great theme of literature is memory. The monumental cycle of novels by
Proust begins with a memory, which Henri Bergson called mémoire involontaire
(Bergson 1982 [1939]). In Proust, entire worlds and fates emerge from the uncon-
scious, all catalyzed by a single sign (a sound, taste, smell, perfume, gesture).
The themes of return and of remembering the past are crucial in literature, as
in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. To remember means that some place or
time or person is “revisited”; in a sense, the absent past is made present, but in
transcendental form. Memory, an apt and well-used vehicle for transcendence, is
also a force for resistance: as long as subjects can remember how things were done
in their culture and community, they are saved by their identity. The following
quote comes from my travel book, New Mysteries of Paris:
History represents collective memory. History-less, synchronic societies . . . like media soci-
ety, do not possess a “memory” in this sense . . . . Every art work is a paradigm of memory
and when we experience it, a reminiscence remains for us . . . . Art work can be detached
from its original world and transferred to a new environment. When one sees immortal
works of European art in an American museum, or [in a concert hall in that country] hears a
performance of Beethoven, the experience is no longer that of the same Rembrandt, El Greco
or Beethoven, but of something else. How is this possible, even though the work itself is the
same? Because those invisible threads of memory, those nets knitted by the Norns, which
connect art to a certain destiny, have broken; people no longer remember them . . . . Memory
is power . . . someone decides what is remembered . . . . Man’s ability to create signification
is completely bound with memory. For what is the value of signs if there is no memory to
preserve them? Even if we . . . experience something existentially . . . that is not sufficient to
us. The experience must be preserved, maintained.
(Tarasti 2004c: 100–103)
There is thus no question of resisting the force of memory. One should rather ask,
On what kind of mental mechanism is memory based? My concern here is not with
psychological theories of memory, but with its philosophical content.
Henri Bergson distinguishes between matière et mémoire as two phases or
elements of memory (Bergson 1982: 163): (1) first, something is presented to a
consciousness; (2) what is represented becomes logically or causally connected
with what preceded or followed it. The reality of any mental object or psycholo-
gical state is based on a double fact: that our consciousness observes it, and that
it belongs to a series, either temporal or spatial, in which the terms define each
other. Peirce would have called such a chain an example of “unlimited semiosis”.
Upon this epistemic foundation Bergson distinguishes two species of mem-
ory. First, there is the permanent memory of the organism. It designates all those
mechanisms whereby the organism is able to react to various challenges of its
environment. This species is in fact a habit rather than a memory. It consists of our
past experiences, but it does not form images. The second kind of memory is true
memory; it sorts and preserves all our experiences and puts them in their proper
places. On the other hand, this memory has to function as an immobile storage
place in constantly mobile time, whereas the apex of memory blends together
with the present, which changes and continuously moves according to the scheme
shown in Figure 9.3.
Figure 9.3: The functioning of the memory according to Bergson
The level AB means the store of memory, with S as its apex, which touches the
surface of reality. It is therefore clear that, so understood, the memory directs,
from point S, our acts and choices in the present.
9.3.2.1 Remembering similitude

As did Bergson, Rudolph Carnap, another great thinker though from a completely
different school (the Vienna circle), built his entire world-view upon the concept of
memory. In his treatise, Der logische Aufbau der Welt, Carnap argues that reality
is based on a unified “field of entities” that can be described or “constituted”.
To constitute, for him, means the following: a being, entity, or concept can be
reduced to another entity when all the expressions concerning it can be reshaped
into expressions concerning those other entities. For Carnap, science can only
describe structures: there is no difference between spiritual and physical entities;
there is only one field of beings. Statements about physical entities can be reduced
to statements about perception (Wahrnehmungen). Carnap defines autopsychic
and alien-psychic entities as follows: the psychic states of an alien-psychic subject
can be perceived only via physical entities, but the observation of our own psychic
states requires no physical mediation. Rather, it occurs immediately. Carnap puts
his entities in the following, descending order of importance: (4) spiritual entities;
(3) alien-psychic entities; (2) physical entities; (1) autopsychic entities.
His starting point is so-called “elementary experience”, which in turn is based
upon “reminiscence” (Ähnlichkeitserinnerung). When one notices a similarity
between two elementary experiences, x and y, then the previous occurrence in
memory x has to be compared to y. The asymmetrical relationship portraying
such an occurrence of perception y means that between x and y there prevails
a reminiscence of similitude (Erinnerung). However, by reminiscence Carnap
does not refer to our keeping in mind some experience that has just occurred,
but not yet vanished, and that is still influencing experience (Husserl’s notion
of retention). Rather, the foundation of the Carnapian system lies in longer-
range memory. It is interesting, for instance, how he “constitutes” other persons’
elementary experience of the world by their means of expression and how they
impart information (we would say: by their sign relationships).
Also of interest is how Carnap constitutes values from the experiences that
one has with them. Carnap argues that to do so is not a matter of psychologizing.
Value itself is not experiential, but exists independently from its instantiation as
experience. In experience, value only becomes observable. What is essential for
Carnap is the “reminiscence of similarity”: the recognition of values at moment S
by a comparison of that moment to the “values” of the store AB⁴.
Carnap interprets causality as a purely interoceptive phenomenon; that is to
say, cause and effect are concepts of the experiential world, not of physical real-
ity. Here he continues a line of critique going back at least to David Hume. For
in Carnap’s system, what ultimately distinguishes real entities from unreal ones
consists of the following principles: (1) every psychic entity belongs to a more
extensive, law-like system, physical entities belong to a law-like physical system,
psychic entities to a psychic system, and so forth; (2) every real entity is intersub-
jective; (3) every real entity has its place in a temporal order.
In other words, entities are defined as identical or different on the basis of
memory, which compares them to other entities and puts them into a temporal
axis. What is essential is that this activity is intersubjective; that is, others be-
sides myself can replicate this kind of thinking. In this respect, one might say that
the Carnapian system differs from the Heideggerian Being, which is always being
mediated by ego.
Of course, this is the case even in the Carnapian autopsychic system, in
which the smallest comparable units are elementary experiences; yet, they are
“pure” experiences, so to speak, which do not depend on the subject carrying
them. Husserl, in his phenomenology, believed likewise; but Heidegger did not. If
we then think of Bergson and the aforementioned store of memories AB, which is
included in each of our acts, then we constantly live “backward”: phenomena and
experiences of our now-moment, on the surface of our reality, are immediately
transferred to the store of memory, from which the movement continues back
to other experiences to which the now-moments are compared. It is precisely in
this manner that the richness of the experiential world emerges. In semiotics,
an analogous case is poetry, whose richness of language, according to Roman
4 One might ask if Carnap’s recognition of values at moment S by comparing that moment to the
“values” of the store AB involves an iconic or an indexical relationship.
Jakobson’s famous definition, derives from the same kind of projection: of a

paradigm into a syntagm. The same occurs in Peirce’s Firstness, which we “live”
at the apex of S. In Secondness this experience has already been transported to
the level of AB; in Thirdness, it is compared to the entire store. In fact, the entire
movement of our subject(ivity) takes place against the grain, so to speak, against
the counter-current. The idea of a continuous becoming is, thus, an illusion.
Hegel declares the substance of the Spirit to be freedom. The goal of the Spirit
in history is thus the freedom of the subject: freedom to have knowledge and
morality, to have common goals, in order that the collective subject might have
infinite value:
“. . . this goal of the spirit of the world is reached by the freedom of everyone” (Hegel 1917: 41).
Hegel later states that this goal has not yet been attained: “Spirit is not a piece of nature, like
an animal. The animal is what it is immediately. Spirit is what it does of itself, what makes
it what it is. Its being is in its activity, not in peaceful existence; its being is an absolute
process”.
(ibid.: 52)
Why do we quote Hegel so often and so closely? It is because the idea of freedom,
particularly in Hegel, is the one which Anglo-analytic philosophers have scoffed
at the most. And one cannot deny that certain comical elements do appear in
Hegelian reasoning:
In the Orient only one was free: the despot; in antiquity some were free but others slaves.
Nowadays, i.e. in contemporary Germany [at the beginning of the nineteenth century!], all
are free, since they are conscious of themselves, as spiritual beings.
Of course, we cannot read Hegel almost two centuries later with any sort of naïve
immediacy. We read him via a filter of interpretation. This occurs, for example,
when we think, Aha! . . . spirit! . . . the global community of our time . . . Baudril-
lard’s bubble world, and the like. Therefore, it is essential to heed the follow-
ing: the representation of reality from the subject’s activity – retention, remin-
iscence of similitude, and other operations – at the same time represents the lib-
eration of our subject from false restrictions. It is the subject’s way of resisting the
constitution-model of the global world into which he or she is constantly being
forced.
What is involved here is the return of the valuation of the subject and of his
liberation. Pure philosophy can in this way be provided with ideological content.
Science, however, can never posit values, but only investigate them. On the one
hand, all arguments can be read ideologically, and all research is guided by some
ideology. On the other hand, any argument advanced by science cannot set values
but only examine them. Since all judgements can be read ideologically, and all
research be guided by some ideology, it is crucial that a scholar be conscious of

his/her ideological position. For when we are aware of such, and when we put
the aforementioned philosophies (from Hegel to Bergson and Carnap) in the con-
text of forces of resistance, then we know what we are doing and are thus able
to observe the ideological nature of our reasoning, so that we do not stray from
objectivity or intersubjective validity.
9.3.2.2 Counterfactuality
The models we have dealt with thus far concern the surface of reality, its recollec-
tion, its store of memory, the now-moment, causality. In the background looms
the subject, whose very being is involved. What, then, does it mean to say that
this subject’s goal would be “freedom”? It means that the course of the subject
is not predetermined, but that an energetic action can take place by the subject,
which, through its acts, moulds its reality.
How can that process be analyzed more closely? Instead of dealing not only
with what something has been, with its registration in memory – in the form, say,
of the texts of history and arts – we can also inquire as to what might have been.
What if a subject had chosen otherwise? This concern brings our inquiry to what
Anglo-analytic philosophy refers to as a so-called “counterfactual” statement. The
Finnish philosopher, Georg Henrik von Wright has examined counterfactual state-
ments, and what follows deals with some ideas presented in his lectures and my
notes on those ideas.
The counterfactual statement is as follows: “If p had been, then q would have
been as well”. The statement is also possible if non-p prevails. (The most common
expression, “If . . . then”, describes causality.) In other words, we scrutinize here
cases that could have occurred under certain conditions. The freedom of our sub-
ject and the Hegelian Spirit, which is always in the process of becoming free, are
of course tightly bound with what might have been possible. In this way, modal
concepts necessarily penetrate into causal explanation, despite the fact that the
positivist attitude in philosophy is very skeptical of modal concepts.
Let us imagine that the surface of reality, the series of Bergsonian now-
moments, could be described with a line:
Next we can probe our knowledge of what lies beneath the surface of the given,
linear reality. In that case, the counterfactual statement is an argument about
what is, rather than about what might be or what might have been. The graphic
representation of the counterfactual statement would thus be the following:
Figure 9.4: Structure of the counterfactual statement
The models above portray alternativity: from the world of the past, alternative −P
was realized. But the alternative P & Q also would have been possible. Only via
this alternative does discourse on possibilities become meaningful, and only via
this alternative can one speak about the freedom of an acting agent.
From this, can we further infer that the more alternatives, the more freedom
our subject has? If so, it would confirm that the further world history proceeds,
in the Hegelian sense, the freer the “Spirit” becomes, since it would have more
and more alternatives stored in its paradigm of memory. In that case, the degree
of freedom is essentially bound with memory, that is to say, with the fact that the
subject recalls previous events and becomes aware of them. Such recollections
and awareness give purpose to world history, as described by Hegel in the follow-
ing statement:
World history presents . . . the development of the consciousness of the spirit beginning from
its freedom and the fulfilment of such a consciousness. Development means that it is a
gradual unfolding, a series of determinations of freedom, which with a concept anticipates
issues [and] the nature of the freedom of the spirit [becomes] conscious of itself. The logical
and dialectical nature of the concept lies in the fact that it determines itself and carries
in itself definitions and rejects them, and in this rejection or negation attains its positive
and richer, more concrete determination. This necessity and contingency of purely abstract
definitions of concepts is studied in logics.
(Hegel 1917: 148)
In the quotation above, Hegel refers to the same process that von Wright describes.
Yet von Wright inquires into that reality of the past which unites the aforemen-
tioned alternatives (Hegel’s Begriffsbestimmungen). Where is the starting point of
those alternatives? What now-moment in Bergson’s model opens up that point of

view?
What occurs is a shift from temporality to counterfactual examination. We get
a series of consecutive situations:
Figure 9.5: Alternatives under the surface of the reality
The connection from A to its causal consequence (if P then Q, or P Q) is

not visible and thus not observable. What, then, justifies drawing a line from the
surface of reality to its alternative or possibility? Von Wright’s answer is that at
least once in the past, the occurrence A P Q must have occurred. That
experience demonstrates that after A, P is possible. This perception is a neces-
sary condition for drawing the figure. But is it a sufficient one? Similarly, world A
sometimes precedes P, and sometimes −P.
It must be underlined that, if we accept this argument, then in reality nothing
would ever happen that has not already happened at least once before. It follows
that the possibilities of the “spirit” of history for creative activity would be highly
restricted. Yet, even intuitively speaking, there must be acts and consequences
that are new, unique and unpredictable. According to von Wright, what is thought
about the depth of possibilities is largely a consequence of what is observed on
the surface of a given reality. Our conception of potentialities is a reconstruction
of possibilities based upon what we know about the surface of that reality. In the
context of theories of memory, such a conception is based upon retention: what we
have stored in our paradigm of memory determines our view of what might have
happened. Applied to history, at both the individual and collective levels, this
would mean that, the more alternatives of which individuals are aware – either on
the basis of their own experience or of historical descriptions – then the freer they
are. To this point, Heidegger’s concepts of Dasein and Da-sein serve to distinguish
between the entire reality, with its possibilities and alternatives (Dasein), and the
mere surface of reality, or just being-there (Da-sein).
For the semiotics of resistance, this distinction is essential. If the surface of

reality is occupied, and subordinated to, an ideology or hegemony, then it is es-
sential that alternatives to that ideology be recognized. The more alternatives, and
the more the subject becomes conscious of them, together increase the resistance.
Yet, in some cases it also prevents action: the more critical one becomes, the more
difficult it is to choose the right alternative, and the harder it is to start defending it
with the full passion (Passion, Leidenschaft) that Hegel considered an indispens-
able force in history.
On the other hand, one must note that not just any observation about the
surface of reality can or does fulfil its potentials. We select certain observations ac-
cording to images that we have even prior to the perception of potentials. Hence it
would be a great mistake for one not to distinguish among and weigh the different
possibilities as weaker and stronger. (In this light, one can consider the surface of
reality to be a particularly “strong” alternative.) Concerning the model of cause
and effect, for example, P would lose its causal role (its force as a cause related
to Q) if we cannot claim that there is a valid alternative to P. Of course, one can also
say that, if we want to become convinced about the validity of some counterfactual
statement, then we do something: we produce the needed situation. But if a large-
scale, collective event is involved, then we of course cannot create it artificially;
instead, we resort to our historical memory and judge whether something similar
could have happened earlier.
In any case, a sign of a genuine act is a genuine alternative. What gives us
full certainty about the worth of alternatives is that they enable us to intervene in
the course of the reality, and the fact that they provide us with something we can
choose. For instance, we know the following:
Figure 9.6: Possible choices in a situation
We can say that A is the reason for (or cause of) P only in the situation A, in which
both P and −P are as possible. If we are passive, then the world changes into P;
if we intervene in the world, then −P follows. What would have happened if we
had not allowed the world to change into −P? This question is justified by the fact
that the situation is in our control. Therefore we get a chain of interconnected con-
cepts: causality is based upon counterfactuality, and the latter, in turn, is based
upon the concept of act.
For our theory of semiotics of resistance, what is most essential is that the
matter of memory brings us to referring backwards, to the counter-current of
signs, to the pondering of what might have been possible (counterfactuality).
We have shown here that to do so is possible, via theories of memory (Husserl,
Bergson, Carnap) based upon the retention of the subject, the comparison of the
now-moment with moment S and its alternatives AB – ultimately, the comparison
of moment S with the recognition of the values retained as paradigms, the store-
house of values, their “encyclopaedia”, to use Eco’s term.
At the same time, it has been argued here that this return is possible as a
logical, mental operation only if it is conceived as the act of a subject. Such a
subject can effect this operation by means of many alternatives, whether they are
previously fulfilled connections between P and Q, or perhaps imaginative innov-
ations, which our subject infers to be possible in his or her situation. Altogether,
this shows that, even in those realities in which everything seems to be linked
to only one scheme of events, there are alternatives, depending on our subject’s
mental capacities and paradigm of memory.
9.3.2.3 Causality
Causality is a central philosophical category that, moreover, comes amazingly
close to the idea of communication. We arrive here at the core of semiotics: Can
one conceive of communication as causal activity? If so, then what would coun-
terfactuality mean in communication? In the speech-act theories of Austin and
Searle, the focus is on the speech act as communication or intention. But, as Karl
Jaspers once asked, Why do we want to communicate? Would it not be better not
to communicate, that is, to be alone? (Jaspers 1948: 338) Before an act of commu-
nication, the agent can choose whether to communicate or not. But after the sign
has been emitted, it cannot be canceled. (Computers, of course, have an “undo”
function, even for e-mail, which one can use to retract a communication; left as it
stands, however, the message is indelibly and irretractably there.)
When Mr. A sends a signal to Mr. B, in the famous diagram by Saussure, does
that process represent causal influence? The answer is, of course, Yes, if one thinks
that the effect or consequence is the meaning-effect that emerges in the mind of
the receiver, Mr. B. If Mr. B’s behavior changes after he receives the message, then
it doubtless has had a causal effect. On the same issue, Finnish semiotician of
education, Esa Pikkarainen, has this to say: “Causal effect is therefore a change in
some entity, which happens because it has come through a certain relationship to
some or some other entities . . . The partners of the causal relationship are beings
and not events . . . . In order to have a causal relation at least one partner must
have the ‘causal power’ to make the other partner change in one way or another”
(Pikkarainen 2004: 69). In communication, however, we do not always intend or
mean to cause changes. Jakobson describes this special kind of communication
(phatic) as participating in the conative function. Yet, say, in autocommunication,
wherein the sender and receiver are one, it is hard to see what the “effect” would
be, namely, how the world has changed after the communication.
Can we also think of a counter-current of signs in communication? Can we aim
the arrow of communication to go counter-clockwise? Paul Ricoeur (2000), in his
magisterial treatise La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, closes with a chapter on “Le par-
don difficile”, in which he deals with the themes of guilt, giving and forgiveness, of
happy memory and unhappy history, and in the end, with the theme of forgetting.
If we repent of sending a message and want to cancel it – which is impossible, if
it has already happened – there remain alternatives: to regret, forget, and forgive.
This is the only way to go against the counter-stream of communication and to
cancel what has happened. This is true in spite of what one reads in Dostoevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov, when the oldest member of a monastery says that a
man’s acts accrue to him, until time runs out and nothing more can be done.
9.3.3 Forces of resistance III: History
Perhaps unnoticeably, we have come through philosophy (both phenomenology

and Anglo-analytic logic) and arrived at problems of history. The sense of history
forms an essential aspect of resistance to the global reality of real, synchronic
time. It can also prevent savage theorizing and experimentation in science, life
practices, and social processes.
The causal relationship is one of the most central ones in historical invest-
igation, as Raymond Aron notes in his Introduction to the Philosophy of History
(Aron 1948 [1961]). He joins the causal relationship to the question of responsib-
ility. Moral, legal and historical responsibilities are all based on the same logical
scheme: the search for reasons. The basic difference among them concerns the
order of reasons: a moralist studies intentions, historians study acts, and lawyers
relate acts and intentions to judicial concepts. The historically responsible person
is one who, by his or her actions, catalyzes an event whose origin is sought. In
Aron’s view, any historical investigation is, by definition, retrospective. All causal
research looks backwards. A historian starts with effects and goes back to ante-
cedents. But a fact always has a number of antecedents. How, then, can we de-
termine the true cause?
To this situation, one could add that a historian’s work is always abductive, a
form of guess-work in getting at the reason. But as Aron states, the historian can
only be psychologically – never “mathematically” rigorous – certain of having
found the real reason or cause. Even if Napoleon did cause the defeat at Waterloo,
I shall never be able to prove it, because that historical sequence of events, unique
in time and peculiar in quality, can never recur. Hence every historian, in order to
examine what happened, must ask what might have happened.
For instance, Leonard B. Meyer (1989), in his Style and Music, considers the
examination of alternatives a central factor in music history. The genius of an
individual composer (Mozart, Haydn, and the like) can show itself only against
the background of alternatives that a composer of that time could have used, that
is to say, the contemporaneous network of possibilities. Aron recommends the
following research strategy: (1) analysis of the phenomenon-effect; (2) discrimin-
ation of antecedents and the isolation of one of them, the efficiency of which is to
be measured; (3) the construction of unreal developments, including alternatives,
or “counterfactuals” in our earlier terminology; (4) comparison of mental images
and the actual events (Aron 1948: 161).
It is, however, often impossible in practice to isolate a single immediate cause,
since the causes can of course be quite general in nature. Thus we come to sociolo-
gical theories in which the causes of an individual event are believed to lie in com-
plex social and statistical processes. As examples of such vast, tightly procedural
studies of history, one can mention Fernand Braudel’s Matérialisme et capitalisme
(1967 [1973]) and Norbert Elias’s Studien über die Deutschen: Machtkämpfe und
Habitusentwicklung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (1989 [1997]). In the first-mentioned
text, the background theory is a view of human material life as characterized by
routines and in which changes occur very slowly. Braudel dares to use the term
“progress”, but underlines that, though it proceeds very slowly, it is not totally
static. His examination concerns the period from the fifteenth to the nineteenth
century. In contrast, Elias focuses on shorter time periods, namely, the develop-
ment of the German national habitus or character. The latter is in turn based on
the dialectics between inner and outer forces⁵, on the civilization process, whose
special nature and collapse in Germany are Elias’s quarry. This study, too, in-
volves events on a large temporal scale, in which individual acts remain in the
background and the criteria of explanation lie in general social processes.
The case of Elias clearly illustrates that national histories are still being writ-
ten. But as Ricoeur asks (2000: 396), Is it still possible to write “cosmopolitan” or
5 For more on the dialectics between inner and outer forces, refer back to the analysis of the
principles of Moi and Soi, in Chapter One.
“world histories”? Specialized histories constitute a resistance to globalizing his-

tories in which the present is so strongly prioritized that the past is not appreciated
at all. Such globalizing histories seem to accelerate and, hence, to rush headlong
to the end of history itself, by portraying so many events occurring within such
relatively short periods of time.
As early as the French annalists, history was being distinguished into differ-
ent levels, such as long-, medium-, and short-term structures, a distinction also
used by Greimas in his Sémantique structurale (Greimas 1980: 172). To write a
“structural history” is to take some institutional or mental entity as an invariable
quantity and schema, into which framework the historical changes and details
are inserted. Such reasoning is not far from Kant’s ideas about history, nor from
Hegel’s action of the “Spirit” in world history. The notion of “idea” or leading
principle has been replaced by that of structure. Lotman’s school of semiotics,
for instance, supposes that the structure of a “text” is a universal, multileveled
formation comprised of phonetics, metrics, syntax, semantics and symbols. Using
this constant structure, Lotmanian semioticians have been able to reconstruct
ancient Slavonic texts, once considered beyond recovery, by postulating units that
take the place of missing elements, that is to say, units which should be there in
order for the structure to be completed. (In principle, this reasoning is not far from
the astronomy of the Renaissance, which supposed that a certain heavenly body
had to exist in order for the mathematical and musical scale of eight tones to be
fulfilled [cf. Eco 1986: 32].)
Narrativity can in this way serve as such a structure. Historical research is
naturally narrative, and all that is considered discourse obeys the laws of narra-
tion. Ricoeur scrutinizes history as narrative, but with the warning that the latter
cannot function as an explanatory or epistemological criterion. In their work, of
course, historians encounter narratives – stories of events – out of which they
create their own narratives. A narrative theory that has developed from legends,
folklore, and myths is considered by historians as too primitive to serve as a model
for the writing of modern history. Narration easily leads one to study history as
“individual cases” against which Braudel juxtaposed his long-term changes.
For historians (and others), the greatest attraction of the narrative model is
the concept of “plot”, since the latter organizes temporal events into a given order.
Something changes into something else – this has been taken as the minimal
condition for any narrative. Further, the plot has an impact on people’s beha-
viour. Lotman’s essay on theatricality provides us with good examples: The last
words of heroes of the French Revolution often seem like speeches from antiquity.
Ludwig II from Bavière, for example, felt that he had conducted himself like the
protagonist of a Wagnerian opera. Thus, plots can be shifted from one domain of
life to another. Insofar as the writing of history uses the same narrative structure
as that of a fictional story, the text becomes its own reality and its connection to
the real world is lost. Thus, the historian has to probe details and piece together
fragments.
Ricoeur speaks instead about the “scale” of durations, borrowing the term
from cartography. When we look at a map, it is essential that we know the scale
to which it has been drawn. Similarly, in historical investigation we must ask first
if it concerns micro- or macro-history. The object of micro-historical studies can
be an individual, whose life is scrutinized in all its details; but at the same time,
that individual is understood to represent something more general. The micro-
history which thus emerges can come dangerously close to unreliable, anecdotal
history, or local history in its extreme. Braudel rejected such accounts as a “history
of events”, since one cannot know anything about a single, unrepeated event.
Paradoxically, an individual event is significant only if it has been repeated, as
Carlo Ginzburg has noted. In semiotics, an equivalent view of “event” is Eco’s
theory that semiotics cannot tell what a work or text was or meant to someone,
but rather studies the structures that enabled such an experience. This thesis,
however, is denied by existential semiotics, as argued earlier.
Ginzburg takes Tolstoi’s War and Peace as an example of micro-history in
which the individual (peace) and the public (war) interpenetrate. Micro-history is
a kind of anti-narration when compared to theories of great men, in which, accord-
ing to Hegel’s model, the reader’s attention is captured by exceptional personal-
ities. In a chapter entitled “The Destiny of an Individual”, he says the following:
“Let us fix our gaze on world-historical individuals and their fates, who have had
the joy of functioning as leaders in the realization of a purpose that forms only
one phase in the general course of development” (Hegel 1917: 78).
But in general can one think, in the context of historical exploration, of anti-
narrativity in a sense other than texts that declare the end of history, its vanish-
ing by becoming synchronized with the world? The fact is that all history, as a
retrospective activity, as collective or individual memory, is also a narration of
resistance, because in such activity one always transcends the surface of reality.
In this respect, merely to defend the existence of history is itself resistance – and
progress.
9.4 What are we resisting?
It is proper to end with a self-critical look at what was said above. Namely, if all
theories are only rationalisations of certain life experiences and positions of a
scholar, then the same must be true about the present essay on the semiotics of
9.4 What are we resisting? | 181
resistance. To make the question more precise: In the end, what has been (or is
being) resisted here?
Have I fallen into the trap of which Ricoeur warns, namely, the idea that the
present time is somehow qualitatively different from previous times? Modernity –
“our” time – is especially privileged when one wants to join (or intervene) in
the classical activity of history-writing on the theme of the worsening decadence
of modern times and symptoms of apocalyptic destruction, as compared to a
past, now-lost, “golden age” when everything was better. If many have taken
the “present day” or one’s own era as somehow decadent (and this has been
happening at least since the seventeenth century), it is clear that the decline
cannot stem from mere chronology but from some other paradigm or context,
into which we try to insert our own time.
Today is most notable by the vanishing of the moral dimension (Charles
Taylor’s thesis): the loss of sense and meaning, accompanied by the search to
regain it. The second main theme of our time is the development of technology,
which threatens our freedom; and the third is the supremacy of the state. For
Taylor, the first of these problems leads to the ethics of self-realization of ego, of
defense of authenticity, the central value of the principle of Moi. By contrast, the
worst fault of Hegel was his exceedingly strong emphasis on state or world history,
or Soi. Yet, such argumentation means a relativization of the phenomenon,
an historicism, as when one adopts an anthropological position. In all these
relativizations we reduce the phenomenon to something else: “It is only this or
that.” Globalization and its values, whose principles were summed up in my list
of 14 points, can only belong to this type of literature of resistance, which has
been available as early as Antiquity and the classics therefrom.
Our point of departure, however, has been the phenomenological principle
that the thing has to be examined as such. This requires that we engage with the
existential situation of the people of our time as it appears. Being is precisely our
being here and now. The Heideggerian concern, about the surrounding world in
which we live, is the only credible fulcrum for theoretical reflection. But in order
to speak about our own situation we have to take distance from colloquial speech
and create a special metalanguage – a unique discourse and concepts with which
to analyze adequately our being. To that end, I have dealt here with three import-
ant categories – being, memory and history – aspects of which can illuminate and
engage with the situation of our time. At the same time, my aim has been not to
lose contact with the reality of this situation, not even for one moment. We can
write science about reality, at the same time as we participate in it.
Chapter 10
Culture and transcendence
Is an existential semiotic theory of culture possible? Such a question came to
my mind when reading recent studies and books on British cultural theory. This
theory, which seems to have become dominant in many fields of social sciences
and humanities and which represents to me those theories belonging to the ‘noth-
ing but . . . ’ category, is almost unavoidable in the academic world nowadays. It is
taken as a given. No one seems to be aware of its inherent cultural imperialism,
which favours the contemporary, globalized, technosemiotic, market-, media- and
consumption-oriented culture which is expanding over the whole world. It is at
the same time a way of relativizing all other alternative views of cultures and all
different approaches to these issues. The culture emerging from this new ‘cultural
theory’ is nothing but an ideological version of the present world civilization.
That remains the case even if we were to admit that culture can, after all, be a
transcendental issue, since often the ideas, identities, etc. to which it constantly
refers are absent, transcendental entities which in spite of this exercise a strong
emotional appeal and have power over people’s minds. However, transcendence
is totally relativized in just the same way as it was by sociology and history during
the sociosemiotic phase of our societies. Communities in which we live are to a
great deal imagined, just as Benedict Anderson tries to show. Does it mean that
they are ‘transcendental’?
Yet the major question about cultures, when they become objects of scientific
research and discussion, is whether there could exist a meta-cultural theory
which would be more than an ideological reflection of one culture, albeit the vic-
torious one. A hope of such a theory would seem to be the only possibility of
avoiding those ‘cross-cultural misunderstandings’ which Walburga von Raffler-
Engel once discussed. To discover or elaborate such a theory is a challenge indeed
for the concept of transcendence itself and its explanatory power for the mundane
affairs of our Dasein. However, taking into account such an issue as transcend-
ence does not mean a shift to, for example, theology. Societies which seem to
try to function upon the transcendental principle, i.e., varieties of religion, have
often proved to be inefficient over a longer period. Thus, in order to obtain an
existential semiotic theory of culture, it is not sufficient to apply only the idea of
transcendence. One needs other aspects as well, such as seeing the situation from
within, and following the ethical principle of the subject’s ability to make choices
and thus influence his/her fate in the world. Any such theory which denies this
subjective point of view is certainly not existential. The cold and inhuman theories
of structuralism, like Michel Foucault’s, are deterministic in this sense. There is
10 Culture and transcendence | 183
something lifeless, extremely pessimistic and passive in those theories regarding

man – who is, however, a political and active animal; such a creature as he ap-
pears in, among others, the writings of Hanna Arendt. She describes her subject
as fighting against the dictatorship of conditions (a term also used by the Finnish
philosopher Georg Henrik v. Wright), and for the ‘infinitely improbable’, which
can be achieved in spite of everything. The Foucaultian vision of society evokes
La Mettrie’s idea of l’homme machine – or Jean Cocteau’s machine infernale, a cruel
game played with humans by the Gods. The existential semiotic view is never like
that; it always gets into the skin of the protagonists of human history, its agents –
and these agents can be anyone, not only in the Heideggerian negative sense of
das Man – but any subject in his/her existential situations.
When lecturing recently on the theme What is Existential Semiotics at the
Finnish Science Society in Helsinki, I was asked by my colleague, Professor of
Translation Theory Andrew Chesterman: ‘Are there any means to test your theory,
or to forecast or predict something with it?’ I said to him: ‘you are very British’ –
which was not intended to be an argumentum ad hominem, but to raise the eternal
question whether philosophical theories in the humanities can be tested, or even
need testing, by experiments or empirical facts; I wanted to point out that the truth
criteria in these issues might be different from the traditional correspondence
theory with its word-thing issues, being based instead on the coherence of the
new model of reading facts, a new conceptual metalanguage. Then our discussion
continued and my colleague put aside the idea of testing and made his criticism
in another way: ‘Can you imagine any evidence which would show your theory
is wrong?’ Here I distinguished a Peircean undertone of fallibilism, i.e., that sci-
entific theories are characterized by their constant renewal when they are shown
to be erroneous and that progress, if any, in science was based precisely upon this.
However, the hypothesis from which I start myself is that conceptual and philo-
sophical theories are almost always nothing but absolutizations of the personal
life experiences of the scholar. If this were true, to say that a theory is wrong would
mean: a) your experience has been wrong, or b) the manner you inferred your
theory from your experiences, i.e., your reasoning, has been wrong. The first point
would be truly tricky: how could you say to anyone that your experience, your life
history, growing into a person, into an identity and into a profession from a mere
physical body, was wrong? To claim such a thing would mean to undervalue and
even be contemptuous of a person and of subjectivity. Yet, there are standpoints
which do this. Marxists say: You represent falsches Bewusstsein and therefore your
ideas are wrong. Psychoanalysts say: You are neurotic, that is why what you say
does not tell us what you really are; according to the Lacanian principle, your sig-
nifiers do not reflect your true signifieds; feminists and gender theoreticians say:
you represent a repressive chauvinist ideology, a patriarchal order; accordingly,
184 | 10 Culture and transcendence
your standpoint is conditioned by your gender position and cannot represent any
ultimate truth, nor even any authenticity. However, I have to leave this debate so
as not to stray from the subject. The other point of view, i.e., my theory is wrong
due to erroneous reasoning, is closer to the ‘normal’ evaluation in science and
humanities. A theory is wrong or right depending on whether it represents his
intuition for the scholar and whether he is able to express and communicate it to
other members of the scientific community.
However, let us also take the idea of testing a theory seriously to the extent
that we could try to find out what kinds of cultural, psychological, and social phe-
nomena could be understood and explained by applying to them the existential
semiotic viewpoint. Taking into account the huge quantity of mankind’s cultural
experiences, what we call ‘traces of humanity’ (I remember Jaroslav Jiránek saying
so), we might try to interpret them by applying our existential theory and asking
whether it functions as a cultural theory or not. Pursuing this line I would propose
that we could use the international research project Semiotics of cultural heritages,
with its approximately 60 young and more advanced scholars all over the world,
as the empirical field where we could apply our theory. However, before doing so
we should define what our existential theory is in this respect, and which elements
of it are relevant here. In the semiotic tradition, we may ask how the other cultural
theories have succeeded in progressing along the same line or digressing from
it in other directions. We need to ask whether we can use the existential theory
to criticize or approve the already existing cultural theories in semiotics, from
Lévi-Strauss, Foucault and Barthes to Eco, Ponzio and even Nietzsche, Bakhtin,
Benedict, Stuart Hall, Valsiner, Deleuze, Münster, Schütz, and many others.
10.1 The theory in brief
Clearly, the reader should know in advance something about the existential the-
ory. However, it would not be necessary to read all my books on the subject; it
is enough to summarize some essentials. As in TV soap operas, the 19th century
newspaper feuilleton novels, or Wagner’s Nibelungen Ring, one has to learn what
happened in the previous part. The theory concerns our Dasein, or the living world
with all its subjects and objects. But the area beyond the Dasein is involved just as
much, and that is called transcendence. What it is is still quite open. The easiest
definition I have discovered is: The transcendent is anything which is absent but is
present in our minds. Modern man might think that it is something like virtuality,
virtual space, some might even say that it is the internet of our time but that
would be going too far! As to the structure of our Dasein, so far I have arrived
at a model which is called Zemic. It consists of four modes of Being which have
10.2 Transculturality | 185
been arranged to form a square. The logical square itself was invented by ancient
stoic philosophers. The Paris school of semiotics took it up again in the 1960s and
called it the ‘semiotic square’ with terms s1, s2, not-s2 and not-s1. This was used
to articulate four modes of being stemming from the Hegelian logic: from an-sich-
sein to für-sich sein (being-in-oneself/being-for-oneself); in turn, this model was
adopted by Jean-Paul Sartre in his existentialist philosophy (L’Être et le néant).
Then, borrowing from these sources, I added from the semiotic theory of the body
(soma/sema) by Jacques Fontanille, and from the philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, the
categories of Moi/Soi. Accordingly, we have four cases of Moi/Soi, M1, M2, S2 and
S1. They correspond to the body, to identity (person), to social practices and to
social norms and values. Each one marks its own Greimassian modality, in the
same order: will, can, know and must. Thus the last modality, that of ‘believe,’
has been reserved for transcendence which can become present and actualized at
any time via acts of negation and affirmation.
Such a model has not been previously presented in semiotics, but in the his-
tory of philosophy I recently found, in the work of an Arabian-Persian Sufi mystic
Ibn Arabi (full name Muhyi al-Dim Ibn Arabi, 1165–1240), an analogous model
of circles of transcendence, also surrounding the four modes of Being. Ibn Arabi
was born in Murcia, in Spain, but after long journeys finally settled at Damas
in Syria. His model portrays six circles of transcendence: 1) the divine presence
(outermost circle), 2) the second circle showing the place of Man, 3) the third circle
representing the presence of the divine in man (similar to what we observe in the
Platonic ideas), 4) this shows Man in contact with the world, 5) the axis cutting
the inner circle into four parts represents multiplicity (the categories of existing
things) in the World and 6) the circle in the middle represents the World of which
Man is master and its support. The four areas starting from the center towards
periphery are separations among the diverse categories of the existing things in
the World.
10.2 Transculturality
By showing this amazing parallel I simply want to emphasise that the existential
semiotic cultural theory should be able to discuss such cases across cultural and
historical borderlines, and develop reading models and concepts of such high
universality that even phenomena as extremely remote from each other as Hegel-
ian logic and Sufi mystics can find a common denominator. That would be true
transculturality and ‘multiplicity’ (see later Deleuze).
There would thus be two parts to this task: first – a historical overview of semi-
otic theories, including those which we do not regard as overtly semiotic in spite
Figure 10.1: Model of circles of transcendence by Ibn Arabi
Figure 10.2: Structure of the Universe according to Ibn Arabi

10.3 Criticism of British cultural studies | 187
of their use of semiotic notions, and often ignoring their origins in the various con-
texts of European semiotics, as in the case of British cultural theory. The second
task is to consider how existential theory would, as a theory, meet the challenge of
the global ethical situation in which we find ourselves now, in our technosemiotic
state, having not yet, hopefully, forgotten the earlier socio- and ethnosemiotic
living worlds. For a long time semiotics has been looking for ways of answering the
essential and vital questions of mankind, not only by being subordinated to the
service of the capitalist consumer world and economic profit, but by pondering on
a non-utilitarian basis the essence of such imminent problems of world cultures
as Umwelt, a non-violent society, human responsibility, growth, education and
cultural identity. The existential theory, by launching such difficult concepts as
transcendence, the Zemic model, new categories of signs, Schein, post-colonial
analysis, the theory of resistance and modalities, attempts to offer a promise in
this direction. It is a comforting fact that often the most abstract theories prove
to be the most practical and have the most pragmatic consequences when facing
empirical reality.
For brevity’s sake, the existential semiotic cultural theory will from now on
be referred to as the ESC theory. So, the ESC theory cannot be a generalisation and
an absolutisation of any particular culture or society. Yet, even this is ambiguous.
On the one hand, Ruth Benedict warned about this as early as her classical work
Patterns of Culture (1951). In the chapter Study of manners she states that a social
scholar gathers a large quantity of material for a treatise on learning, on narciss-
ism as the origin of neuroses, but deals with only this material. In other words:
he/she does not care about social systems and cultures other than his/her own.
He/she identifies, for example, local Westerns attitudes with human nature and
calls their description ‘Economy’ or ‘Psychology’.
Yet this happens very often, and did happen in earlier times with speculative
theories of the human mind. However, we should not reject such theories out of
hand, since they might contain something similar to what Lévi-Strauss called,
in a neo-Kantian manner, ‘categories of the human mind’ (categories de l’esprit
humain).
10.3 Criticism of British cultural studies
Let us consider briefly the modern cultural theory course books used in all uni-
versities nowadays. First, let us take the book by Chris Barker, Cultural Studies:
Theory and Practice (2008). In its foreword Paul Willis says: ‘At an everyday and
human level, cultural interests, pursuits and identities have never been more im-
portant’. Individuals and groups want [. . . ] ‘something more than passive or un-
conscious acceptance of a historically/socially prescribed identity (simply being

working class, black or white, young or old, etc.). Everyone wants to have or make
or be considered as possessing cultural significance’. This sounds rather ‘exist-
ential’ and promising. Yet, it is not specified here who that ‘everyone’ is, which
I am afraid is very similar to the Heideggerian ‘average person’, das Man of the
contemporary global marketing culture. After a long list of ‘possible cultures’,
from interpersonal interactions to group norms, communicative forms, texts and
images to institutional constraints, social imagery and economic political determ-
inants, the author says: ‘We are condemned to a kind of eclecticism because of
the very eclecticism and indissoluble combinations of the dissimilar in the in-
creasingly complex “real” world around us’ (Paul Willis, in Barker 2008: xxii).
But what is ‘real’? This was precisely the theme of a major semiotic congress in
Ankara, Cankaya University organized by the architect Zeynep Onur. It is exactly
the present technosemiotic global consumption world and nothing else which is
absolutized here as the ‘World as such’. I have elsewhere posed this question from
the standpoint of an emancipated subject: do we want to be part of that world?
In fact this is already quite Hegelian. ‘Real’ equals to wirklich, and Hegel said:
was vernünftig ist, das ist wirklich, und was wirklich ist, das ist vernünftig. So the
logic of this world is taken as universally true. However, let us remember what
the Austrian writer Robert Musil said in his Der Man ohne Eigenschaften: Wenn
es Wirklichkeitssinn gibt muss es auch Möglichkeitssinn geben (If one has sense
for reality, one must also have sense for possibility). There is nothing determined
about reality or the world, there are always alternatives, possibilities.
Even Willis speaks about the ‘postdisciplinary’ nature of cultural studies. In-
stead of writing endlessly ‘introduction to... that and that’, they are a privileged
site for the emergence of the discipline of disciplines. He is impressed by how
Chris Barker deals with topics such as world disorder, sex, subjectivity, space,
cultural policy, identity, youth culture, television, ethnicity, race . . . which reveal
‘. . . some concrete grounds of a complex and rapidly changing “real” world . . . and
these sites are presented in selected theoretical contexts. In one word: he aims for
a supra- disciplinary base’ (ibid.: xxiii). It is certainly the case that the ESC theory
shares the same goal, but not on such an eclectic basis. Barker sees all cultural
forms as structured like language – how familiar that sounds! That was the thesis
of the structuralists a long time ago. However, how is such a supra- or meta- or
fundamental deep level of reflection to be reached? Jaan Valsiner discusses this
in terms of cultural psychology (Valsiner 2007). He has a diagram which, in cross-
cultural psychological terms, ‘generates’ the culture top-down, from humankind
to particular societies A, B, etc., to social institutions within the society, to indi-
vidual persons. This model is then corrected and replaced by another, in which
culture ‘belongs to’ an individual, in this model the participation is first analyzed
10.4 Language games | 189
by using samples which exemplify the psychological systems of these individuals.

The theory is then tested on other individuals and so forth. Ultimately, one may
attain a general theory of humankind and its cultures (ibid.: 28). This means that
such a meta-level is reached inductively, by studying a sufficient number of ‘cases’
of human cultures. The existential theory is certainly close to this kind of ‘psycho-
logizing’ of anthropological theories; however, it is not a psychological theory as
such, but rather a conceptual one. We shall soon see in what way.
10.4 Language games
In what follows, I shall purposely juxtapose the cultural theory and ESC theory,
so that the latter’s distinguishing features are foregrounded. The purpose is not to
engage in polemics for their own sake, but simply to situate the new theory among
other existing theories, and to state, at the least, what it is NOT. To criticize another
theory by listing all that it is lacking would be the most primitive kind of scientific
debate and should be avoided, since no theory can take everything into account.
Barker says in his opening: ‘I explore that version of cultural studies which
places language at its heart’. He gives greater attention to poststructuralist the-
ories of language than to ‘the ethnography of lived experience’ (Barker 2008: 3).
Barker then argues that: ‘Cultural studies does not speak with one voice . . . ’ but
as early as in the next phrase he admits that his whole theory draws on work
‘developed in Britain, United States, Continental Europe (most notably France)
and Australia’ (ibid.: 4). He admits: it would be more accurate to describe this
text as Western cultural studies. ‘I simply do not feel qualified to say how much
cultural studies as I understand it, is pertinent to the social and cultural condi-
tions of Africa’ (ibid.: 9). What follows throughout the whole book then clearly
demonstrates that, true, certain French authors are accepted but they appear as
individual geniuses, totally detached from their original ideas, historical roots
and contexts. We all know how the American book markets are always ‘discov-
ering’ a genius from Paris, who is full of such talents only waiting to be found out
by managers; his/her output is quickly translated into English, he/she is turned
into a new intellectual fashion icon – just as it happened with Foucault, Der-
rida, Barthes, etc.: the list is endless. Barker admits that Africa is outside his con-
text, but where is Asia, Latin America, Russia, etc.? This is exactly what Benedict
warned about: a theory is valid only within one limited area and culture – al-
though now expanded as a new civilization via globalization to every corner of the
world. But the imperialist purport of such enterprise is immediately clear. Such a
totally Anglocentric theory can never be the ESC theory!
Furthermore Barker remarks: ‘Cultural studies is constituted by the language

game of cultural studies’ (2008: 4). Is this then the famous ‘linguistic turn’, the
same as in Anglo-analytic philosophy? The ESC theory admits the importance of
metalanguage to deal with different cultures, but that is another issue. The claim
is then made about cultural studies as politics, in that the subject is important for
its exploration and representation of marginalized social groups and the need for
cultural change. The author then talks boldly about the production of meaning
in language as signifying practices. How can this be claimed without a semiotic
theory? Moreover, the author states that ‘Cultural studies has for the most part
been concerned with modern industrialized economies and media cultures along
capitalist lines’ (ibid.: 9). He thus tries to combine these signifying practices with
political economy. He certainly takes the present economic system as a given.
Signifying practices have to be adapted to it. He then argues that cultural studies
are non-reductionist. Yet nothing is said about the culture itself. The same often
holds true for communication studies, which investigate only how something is
communicated, and not what is communicated.
10.5 Articulation
Then comes the notion of ‘articulation’. It means the formation of a temporary

unity between elements that do not have to be combined. Strange! It is certainly
true that articulation stems from linguistics and refers to levels of articulation, the
1st and 2nd articulation in semiotics as defined by André Martinet (see also Eco).
Nothing is said about its origin. In the chapter titled Power cultural studies are
said to be concerned with subordinate groups. What groups? The next chapter, on
popular culture, reveals that popular cultures are obviously thought to be subor-
dinate. This idea also appears elsewhere. For instance, popular music is regarded
as being in a minority position, although it holds all the power in the market and
what is now subordinated and threatened is undoubtedly classical music, as well
as all of high culture in general (Roger Scruton being the only scholar with the
courage to defend it in his book Modern Culture, 2005).
We then have the notion of the ‘hegemonic’ text. Since images, sounds, ob-
jects and practices are sign systems which signify with the same mechanism as a
language, we may refer to them as cultural texts. The distinction between verbal
and non-verbal is totally omitted. Naturally, this evokes the Lotmanian theory of
culture as texts. Text is there generalized to concern any cultural object or activity.
A difficult point might arise when a scholar turns to an intra-textual world of
objects without temporality (like painting or architecture). Texts, being faithful
10.5 Articulation | 191
to their linguistic origin, normally have a beginning and an end. Why not replace
this term by the notion of narrativity and narrative?
Next comes the issue of subjectivity. This is involved as a part of consumption,
i.e., we exist as subjects only as consumers. ‘The moment of consumption marks
one of the processes by which we are formed as persons. How we are produced as
subjects’ (Barker 2008: 11). The author does not ask: How do we make ourselves?
Identities are discursive constructions, we then learn. We have to study the class
basis of a culture that aims to give voice to the subordinated . . . but, again, who
are they, those imagined ‘subordinated’? We then move on to structuralism, with
only three authors named: Saussure, Lévi-Strauss and Barthes. Lévi-Strauss is
introduced via Edmund Leach – we all know how superficial that is – and it is said
of him: ‘Typical of Lévi-Strauss structuralism is his approach to food, which, he
declares, is not so much good to eat as good to think with’ (ibid.: 17). About struc-
turalism, we are told that it is ‘synchronic in approach analyzing the structures of
relations in a snapshot of a particular moment’. This sounds totally mysterious.
Moreover, ‘structuralism is best approached as a method of analysis rather than
an all-embracing philosophy’.
Postmodernism is supposed to claim: ‘knowledge is not metaphysical, tran-
scendental or universal but specific to particular times and spaces’. Here tran-
scendence is obviously misunderstood, transcendence is not ‘there’, somewhere
high up, but it is here, where we have actualized it in our Dasein, as is proposed
by the ESC theory. Later on, more is said about subjectivity and identity, in the
chapter on personhood as a cultural production. What it means to be a person
is social and cultural ‘all the way down’. Identities are wholly social construc-
tions and cannot exist outside cultural representations . . . but later it is admitted:
‘. . . identity is an essence that can be signified through signs of taste, beliefs, atti-
tudes and lifestyles. Identity is deemed to be both personal and social’ (Barker
2008: 216) – i.e., according to our theory both M2 and S2. It is then suggested
that ‘There are no transcendental or ahistorical elements to what it means to be a
person’ (ibid.: 218). Thus the theory denies totally the concept of a ‘transcendental
ego’ behind our constructed social ‘egos’. Yet if this is so, how is it possible that
we can read texts that are a thousand years old as if they were written yesterday?
Moreover, the book claims that what it is to be a person cannot be universal.
Psychoanalysis is to be read as a set of poetic, metaphorical, and mythological
stories. It cannot be the basis of a universal theory (ibid.: 223). In the chapter
Language and identity we read that one cannot have an ‘I’ and one cannot have an
identity. Rather, one is constituted through languages. Language does not express
an already existent ‘true self’ but brings the self into being (ibid.: 225). But then
we can ask: Do we exist only when we are talking?
Later on it becomes clear that articulation here means something totally dif-
ferent from its original meaning in linguistics. Following the interpretation used
here, it applies, rather, to human development in general, as Kierkegaard used
it once in his famous Stages of life (orig. Stadier af livet), which were aesthetic,
ethical and religious. We could then say that they are levels with different articu-
lations which always take place when we move from one ‘subject position’ to an-
other. There is thus no organic growth from one to another, as Goethe presumed.
This provides man with the freedom to rearticulate himself again when shifting to
a new level. Applying this to our Zemic model, a move from M1 to M2 and further to
S2 can also mean a rearticulation of one’s inner semiotic mechanisms, modalities.
If one is clumsy, slow, weak, inadequate in M1, one may suddenly become, with
determination, like another person in M2, and even change one’s M1 profile by
training; one can even have this happen in order to reach a degree of S2. Well,
Richard Wagner never became an S2 actor, although he wanted it as M2 – because
as M1 he was too short and his voice was unclear. Demosthenes stuttered in M1
but became a great orator in S2. The ballet dancer Jorma Uotinen was almost
paralyzed in M1 in his youth by a rare illness, but became a famous dancer in S2.
Other examples could be given. Oscar Parland has portrayed this kind of event
in his novels: a new ‘person’ or mode of being can emerge like a butterfly from
caterpillar, as a metamorphosis.
10.6 Subject positions
In modern theory we might say that the ‘subject position’ changes. As Barker puts
it, ‘Thus the same person is able to shift across subject positions according to cir-
cumstances’ (2008: 231). But behind this argument is the very postmodern state-
ment that ‘No single identity can . . . act as an overarching organizing identity . . .
We are constituted by fractured multiple identities’. This is the favourite idea of
many contemporary thinkers who deny the possibility of a transcendental ego.
Naturally, if there is a transcendental ego, the person is not a new subject on
the same level as others, but functions from another logical position altogether.
Yet this is what has just been denied above. In our framework, does the subject
position mean adopting one of the modes of being M1, M2, S2 or S1, and staying
in it? This is certainly an error, since if you classify people according to one mode,
you forget that everyone is always a combination of all four of them. Identities
are better described as certain constellations of these modes with different em-
phases among them. In one identity, M1 is important, let us say, for a member of
an athletic club, while for another the S1 mode is the most essential, as in the life
of a saint in a desert, or a martyr. Therefore, if you classify a person according to
10.7 What Foucault said | 193
the categories ‘fat/thin’, you dwell in M1, but maybe the person considers himself
more in terms of M2, i.e., ‘cheerful/serious’? Yet, if subjects are regarded as idiots
who do not know what happens within them – as structuralists are always claim-
ing – someone else is making their discourse and thus subordinating them. So the
emic aspect is totally lacking here.
10.7 What Foucault said
Nevertheless, it is interesting in itself to raise the problem of what is described as

the ‘agency’, and the politics of identity. This is linked to the theories of Foucault.
It has been said that, for him, subjects are discursive constructions and products
of power. But he has been criticized for not providing us with a theory of agency
(Barker 2008: 232). For him, ethics are concerned with practical advice as to how
one should concern with oneself in everyday life. He speaks about the ‘techniques
of the self’. Ethics center on the government of others and the government of
oneself. Ethical discourses construct subject positions which enable agency to
occur. Agency is a discursive construction exemplifying the productive character
of power, according to what Baker supposes Foucault has said. Yet, such an ethical
standpoint is close to the utilitarian ethics. Ethics exist to improve the welfare of
subjects. This ignores a very essential aspect of ethics, which is that, most often,
to follow an ethical principle and to carry out an ethical act does not lead to any
advantage, profit or promotion of the agent’s own life, but rather the reverse.
A person who does good things is hated by others, and ultimately destroyed. Why?
Because to do good means that one is stronger than others. This is something
most people cannot accept. Yet, we might say that doing good makes evil manifest
itself, and when evil is visible, observable, it is easier to fight against it. In any
case, the ethical principle is a much deeper mental capacity than mere reflection
of S1 and S2 in one’s mind, i.e., coming from the outside, from the Soi. It is already
in Moi, or rather it is in every mode, and particularly as a transcendental, virtual
value waiting for its actualization. The director of the Great Encyclopedic Center of
Islamic Studies, said in Tehran at the opening of a symposium on ethics (March 5,
2014), that it is more important than religion. “Good is good, and bad is bad uni-
versally, for all human beings”. Such a conception of ethics goes indeed much
deeper than the Western theories of it often do.
However, what Foucault actually said was that he denied the existence of such
a thing as a transcendental ego. He argues in The Order of Things (orig. Les mots et
les choses): ‘If there is one approach that I do reject, however, it is that (one might
call it broadly speaking the phenomenological approach), which gives absolute
priority to the observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act,
which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity, which, in short,
leads to a transcendental consciousness’ (Foucault 1970: xiv). Thus he seems to
deny the whole idea of agency and claims, as Barker puts it: social systems operate
to structure what an actor is. However, the concept of ethics centered around the
care of the self is an extremely limited view.
It is true that there is something pessimistic and gloomy in the Foucaultian
view of man. Famous and often quoted is the passage from the above-mentioned
treatise: ‘Strangely enough, man – the study of man – supposed by the naïve to
be the oldest investigation since Socrates – is probably no more than a kind of rift
in the order of things, or, in any case, a configuration whose outlines are determ-
ined by the new position he has so recently taken in the field of knowledge . . . It
is comforting and a source of profound relief to think that man is only a recent
invention, a figure not yet two centuries old . . . . that he will disappear again as
soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form’ (ibid.: xxiii). It goes without
saying that such a standpoint could never be acceptable in the ESC theory. Yet, the
Foucaultian archaeology project has a heuristic value in revealing a general space
of knowledge, its configurations and the mode of being of the things that appear
in it; all this defines ‘. . . systems of simultaneity as well as mutation sufficient to
circumscribe the threshold of a new positivity’ (ibid.: xxiii). Clearly, this is the aim
of an existential metatheory of cultures as well, in regard of the level of profundity.
Foucault does not seem to notice that by saying that, he is positioning himself as
a scholar in the role of a transcendental ego whom he wanted to remove from
his scholarly discourse altogether. What Menard Boss said about scientific pre-
understanding holds true here quite well.
If Foucault disliked the idea of transcendence, so also did Lévi-Strauss who
ten years before Foucault said the same in his Structures of elementary parenthood
(1949) in the acclaimed chapter on ‘archaic illusion’. Yet, he did so with agency as
it is understood in cultural theory: freedom, free will, action, creativity, original-
ity and possibility of change through actions of free agents. Against these theses
Barker proposes that subjects are determined by social forces that lie outside of
themselves as individuals. He says that a great many actions of modern life are
routine in character. Often we do not make self-conscious choices at all, but follow
a socially determined routinized path. This is also the claim made by Umberto Eco
when he talks of the automatism of the codes which force us to do certain things.
Yet, for Barker ‘the best we can do is to produce another story about ourselves’,
even though ‘we clearly have the existential experience in facing and making
choices’ (Barker 2008: 236). However, the existence of social structures (S2) is not
only negative: it also enables us to realize our actions. Thus, according to Barker,
human freedom cannot consist of an escape from social determinants.
10.8 Action | 195
10.8 Action
We might then ask whether the ESC theory is a theory of pragmatic action. If the
ESC theory essentially deals with the change and transformation of culture, the
logic of act and event fits well with its essence, following Georg Henrik v. Wright.
Is a shift from one mode to another an act or an event? Does it occur by itself or only
by purposeful intentional act? Acts are not changes in the world as such. They are
not events. But many acts are portrayed as causing changes. To act means, in a
sense, to intervene in the course of nature. Yet, an event is a shift from 1) one state
to another (for instance a window is opened), 2) from a state to a series of events
(for instance to start running), 3) from a series of events to a state (for instance to
stop talking) or 4) changes in series of events (for instance: a walking man starts
to run). One has to distinguish the act categories – for instance to perform music –
and an individual act – to perform Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The logical differ-
ence between acts and events is in their activity and passivity. An act needs an
agent. An individual event means that a general event takes place in a particular
situation. An individual act is to perform a general act in a particular situation
and through a particular agent.
We can now already apply this kind of analysis and ask whether in our exist-
ential model changes (i.e., shifts from one mode to another, from M1 to M2, from
body to person, etc.) are acts or events. It is an event when, for instance, a body
grows and becomes a person, but it is an act when a certain body decides to adopt
certain habits and thus becomes a person. Thus a change from M2 to S2 means:
a certain person becomes a certain kind of professional, let us say in the family
of Habsburgs they all become kings and queens at a certain moment; in certain
societies certain types of persons automatically take up certain positions, such
as warriors, priests, governors, following Dumézil’s Indoeuropean model. But if
particular persons decide to take up particular professions as their choice, their
decision and effort to reach these positions in S2, then these are acts. Moreover, in
v. Wright’s theory one distinguishes acts and events, and then activities – series of
events or processes. Events take place, but processes just go on. So by applying the
Wrightian logic of change we can analyse the growth of a culture, how a culture
becomes a culture.
Moreover, we may ask: If M1 and M2 still represent the biological and S2 and
S1 the social levels, how does the shift from nature to culture take place? Is it
the Rousseauian narrative of the kind ‘all is good in nature and becomes bad in
culture’? Yet we may suppose that the movement in the Zemic model is partly
automatic, i.e., caused by events, and partly caused by acts. But in both cases
the logical operations of affirmation and negation have their role. Forbearance is
a kind of negation. An agent forbears in a certain situation from doing a certain
thing, if and only if he could do it but in fact does not do it. If we then go on to
establish norms, there are three types of them: something should be done – an
order; something is allowed to be done – a permission, something is not allowed
to be done – a prohibition. Thus, if we know the modes beginning from S1 – the
social norms and values – and they have these statuses, the first two, S1 and S2,
launch the chain from S1 up to M1, but the third one, M2, can stop it. But even then,
this forbearance can have certain consequences which, again, have their impact
on the course of events. Is the movement within the Zemic model the same as the
temporal course, i.e., the duration of one individual’s life and the history in the
life of collectivities?
The model could be formalized here: ‘should’ = M1 →→ M2, ‘allow’ =
M1 ⋅ ⋅ ⋅ → M2 (i.e., M2 is permitted after M1), and ‘forbidden’ = M1 → / → M2.
Furthermore, we can ask whether the movements are the same in both directions,
from M1 to S1 and from S1 to M1.
There is already so much use of formal schemes that we may return to the
question of whether in fact ESC is close to Anglo-analytical philosophy. The use
of formal languages was one of its criteria. However, if we think of the origins of
the model, it was the logical square on four terms s1, s2, not-s1 and not-s2, once
used by ancient logicians. With A. J. Greimas it became the semiotic square. In the
ESC it became the Zemic model. If we accept this as an approval of formal logic we
have already satisfied two criteria; the first one was the linguistic turn – which,
however, in the ESC theory received a somewhat different interpretation. The third
criterion still remains: is this the correct philosophical style? This is the hardest
criterion, since a theory which also stems from Hegel, that ‘conceptual poetry’, as
one semiotician said, and which uses the notion of transcendence which others
hate, certainly could not meet the challenge of achieving the correct philosophical
style in the Anglo-analytical sense. However, let us keep on trying to use our Zemic
model and its explanatory power for another presentation of a cultural theory.
10.9 Cultivating
Michael Ryan has published another course book, Cultural studies. A Practical In-
troduction (2010). It has the following chapters which by their titles already reveal
all that belongs to the field of cultural theory: 1) Policy and industry, 2) Place,
space and Geography, 3) Gender and Sexuality, 4) Ideologies, 5) Rhetoric, 6) Eth-
nicity, 7) Identity, Lifestyle, and Subculture, 8) Consumer culture and Fashion
studies, 9) Music, 10) Media studies, 11) Visual culture, 12) Audience, Perform-
ance and Celebrity, 13) Bodies and things, 14) Transnationality, Globalization and
Postcoloniality. The book begins as follows: ‘The word culture has always had
10.9 Cultivating | 197
multiple meanings. In one sense of the word, culture is inseparable from human
life. Everything from how we dress to what we eat, from how we speak to what we
think, is culture. You only notice this really when you change and enter another
culture’ . . . ‘Culture becomes visible when we travel between “cultures” ’ (ibid.:
viii). Let me note at this point another new British book about culture, namely
Roger Scruton’s Modern Culture. He refers to Herder, who defines Kultur as the life-
blood of a people, the flow of moral energy that holds society intact. Zivilisation by
contrast consists of manners, laws and technical know-how. Nations may share a
civilization but they will always be distinct in their culture, since culture defines
what they are. So reasons Scruton (op. cit.: 1). I have already dealt elsewhere with
the Kultur/Zivilisation distinction in my essay on Resistance (see Chapter 9), where
globalization appeared as a new type of civilization, conquering all geographical
spaces and places and destroying local cultures. Culture here is the essence of a
nation. Yet another theory emphasizes its Latin etymology, namely the process
and activity of cultivating something. Here we meet Wilhelm Humboldt and his
famous Bildung, finely translated into English by Scruton: ‘cultivation’ (not edu-
cation, formation and so on). For Herder, culture, i.e., S1, constitutes practices and
beliefs – S2 – creating the self-identity, or M2, of a tribe. Thus, it penetrates all the
modes of the Zemic model! But then Scruton is almost the only author who dares
to mention the idea of high culture versus common culture. When British cultural
theory emerged, strongly influenced by the views of Raymond Williams, it was a
rebellion against the elitist tradition; as Scruton says, alongside the elite culture
of the upper class, there has been another culture, by no means of less value, of
people who affirmed their solidarity in the face of oppression and through which
they expressed their identity and a sense of belonging (Scruton, op. cit.: 3). This
is exactly the case of Nancy Mitford’s famous distinction between two languages:
Upper class or U-language and Non Upper class, i.e., non-U-language (for instance
in low culture you say: ‘greens’, in upper class language you should say ‘salad’; in
low culture one says: ‘What?’, in high culture one should say instead: ‘I beg your
pardon?’). This is certainly true.
In all of semiotics and its expansion in the 1960s there was always present
this cultural trait: one could deal with the low culture phenomena in academic
discourse by semiotic formal analysis, its rigorous method made it acceptable and
legitimate in that sphere; whereas when the same approach was directed towards
the high culture phenomena, they were regarded as alienated and distanced from
their origins, a view which became politically acceptable in the often leftist intel-
lectual semioticians’ communities. The success of Roland Barthes was to a large
extent based on this. However, the idea of culture as something elevated, some-
thing to be reached, a kind of goal for life aspiration, from M1 to M2 via S2 to S1, was
the idea behind all of arts education - and why not education as a whole? Namely,
if you adapt yourself to sociological relativism, you have only behaviours of equal
value. In particular when you observe a society from the outside. From the inside,
within the Zemic model, it looks different. Certain values become manifest only
when one believes in them and follows them in one’s activities. This explains why
adherents of high culture claim that they, and not the others, represent the true
values of a culture. They are right in this emic aspect.
We should thus distinguish between culture as a Zemic entity, i.e., in its inner
aspect, and culture as a Zetic object, i.e., in its external aspect. Culture as a collec-
tion of cultural objects, culture as signs represents, of course, the Zetic view. The
author then says: culture means conformity with the reigning standards, norms
and rules – which is what we mean by S1. If culture means embedded norms,
then norms are learned as one grows up – this means the gradual shift from M1
to S1. This means that culture consists of, on the one hand, practices in which we
engage, norms by which we live in S2 and S1 in the Zemic aspect, and cultural
artifacts, signs, texts, etc. or S2, S1, as the Zetic aspect, or outer entities. To make
a musical recording one must not only have talent, i.e., the Zemic M2 and S2,
but also a production company, i.e., the Zetic S2. Culture in the sense of artistic
objects is possible only if culture in the first sense, as a way of life, gives permis-
sion, argues Dr. Ryan. Thus the Zemic and the Zetic are in constant interaction
and fluctuation. Yet, there is a creative aspect in culture on the normative side.
Avant-garde art questions norms and thus yields a creatively dissonant collision.
In fact, in our Zemic model, transformed into a narrative model of text analysis,
we encounter such collisions among all the four modes or levels. See my study on
Robert Schumann’s Fantasy C major op. 17 in Tarasti, Semiotics of Classical Music
(2012). Since that is the case, Ryan’s idea of certain cultural forms being victimized
is very strange. Who is victimized by whom and where, after all?
We may now have enough material to claim that ESC theory is certainly not
the same as British cultural theory. Indeed, it tries to go beyond such kind of
‘ideological’ science which stems directly from a particular type of society, albeit
a triumphantly victorious one. British cultural theory is altogether an ideological
variant of the globalized market culture without alternatives. Yet it has presen-
ted some categories which are of interest, since, even when developing the ESC
theory, we live in the 21st century and not in 18th or 19th century Europe.
10.10 Content and Speculation
We have not said anything so far about the content of our existential theory of
culture, i.e., what kind of image or view of culture it offers. Is culture something
organic, something like an organism? This metaphor was once strongly promoted
10.10 Content and Speculation | 199
by Oswald Spengler and of course a long time before him by Goethe. Spengler
writes: ‘Culture and the spirituality of great historic organisms differ from each
other by habitus. The habitus of existence consists of a higher offer of all cultures,
the manifestation of all life . . . there appears a style of a certain soul. Habitus
includes a certain life span and tempo of development. The concept of life time of
a man, butterfly and oak contain in spite of accidents of fate, a certain value. Sim-
ilarly, every culture and period, rise and fall have their given duration expressed
by a symbol’ (Spengler 1963: 98). Certainly ‘habitus’ here is not the same as for
Bourdieu. Spengler utilizes such notions as the soul and symbol and talks of the
Apollonian, Faustian magic symbols of the ancient Greek, Western culture, as well
as of Arabian, Chinese primal symbols, art works as living wholes . . . I would not
be surprised at Professor Chesterman preceding this speculation with his ques-
tion: is there any evidence which would show that these ideas are wrong? Spengler
fits well with youthful minds, and so I may quote myself from my notebook from
1967 (written in Vienna): ‘Sometimes it seems as if we are living in a world of
two cultures: one is the authentic Faustian one (to please Spengler!) which is to a
great extent national, or let us say European – and the other one is the culture of
technics and mathematics, one of “numbers”, which is international. That could
be called a machine culture’.
Furthermore, we can of course ask whether ESC theory is a speculative theory,
such as those produced in German philosophy beginning from the 18th century. If
we dare to quote Hegel in semiotics, we certainly have to answer this question.
Hegel aimed for a complete explanation of being. He adopted the Kantian idea of
categories but for him the number of categories was limitless, and together they
formed the absolute, the whole reality. Hegel’s philosophy was metaphysical or
objective idealism. The objective reality is the absolute spirit. Things are concepts,
such as we can know. Knowing is Einfühlung to the thing and its possession by
thought. Thus Reason creates the world. Aristotelian logic operates with genus
plus differentia. In Hegel the opposition of a concept is already contained in the
concept itself: Sein – Nichts – Werden. Criticism of Hegel claims that without a
particular speculative conviction his logic is not accessible. The absolute nature of
his dialectics and certainty are based on the feeling of subjective certainty, not on
objective facts. Therefore it is irrational by nature. To put it less bluntly, we might
rather say that his aim was a kind of supra-rationalism. The subject he is talking
about is not the same as the real, physical, psychological subject, Professor Hegel
lecturing in Berlin. It is a construction, or what is called a transcendental ego, as
Sartre and others referred to it later. Or we could take his philosophy as a narrative
in which the implied philosopher or author is not the same as the real person (how
this fits together with what Menard Boss said about the origin of any scientific
thought is of course a problem). Hegel is said to represent the last attempt to con-
centrate on the constructive problems of ideas. He believes in thoughts and ideas

as forces making world history, and therefore having great pragmatic import. If
we accept the idea of a ‘system’ in Hegel, then in our ESC theory we might as
well accept its connection with praxis – albeit some say those consequences were
disastrous for mankind.
10.11 The organism
There are many ideas of a speculative nature the relevance of which to the ESC
theory needs to be examined, such as the idea of an organism. If we think of
culture as Growth, as in the idea of Bildung, the metaphor is certainly striking. It
means that culture is, if not reduced back to, then at least thought to stem from –
nature. The whole Lévi-Straussian problem with the shift from nature to culture
was with finding rules of a universal nature. It is typical of nature that it can give
only what it has received, whereas in culture an individual always receives more
than he gives and gives more than he receives. The exchange was called by Marcel
Mauss ‘fait total social’, and mutual communication was one such universal rule
where culture emerges from nature. In the chapter Archaic illusion Lévi-Strauss
mentions three universal rules: the existence of rules, the concept of mutual ex-
change between the self and others as the mediation of this opposition, and the
synthetic nature of a gift, i.e., the transfer of value from one individual to another,
creating a relationship between these individuals and adding a new quality to the
value. This is what Bakhtin said later about the basic nature of dialogue. This is
certainly very important in our ESC theory, which so far is based upon the inner
structure of one subject only. The idea of an organism, for instance in the biose-
miotics of Uexküll, originates from the German speculative organism philosophy
and Kantianism, namely the idea of exchange between an organism and Umwelt,
which is filtered by Merken und Wirken and by Ich Ton of the organism. Yet in
Lévi-Strauss the idea of an organism is strange. The manner in which Lévi-Strauss
portrays the Nambikwara society and its leadership is close to the Durkheimian
idea of organic solidarity. ‘Personal prestige and the ability to inspire confidence
are the basis of power in Nambikwara society’ (Kuronen 2011: 1). From this the
Finnish scholar Tuomas Kuronen, in his study of political leadership in Finland,
drew the conclusion that the same model applies in Western culture: ‘Cultural
layers, especially those built upon Western educational and conceptual institu-
tions are privileged in the way Western people make sense of their world. They . . .
are taken as granted, in a similar way the Nambikwara would take theirs’ (ibid.).
What is behind such an analogy is certainly the idea of culture as a kind of organic
entity, also present in the idea of Bildung.
10.12 Generation | 201
In archaic culture the tribal structure shows features of such an organic

nature as semio-anthropologist Jean-Claude Mbarga has shown in his recent
study of the Cameroonian culture and identity. Mbarga portrays a culture and
society in which tribalism, clannism and sectarianism are dominant and make a
real religion of everyday life. His approach is existential in the sense that it is not
reductionist in any structural way but takes into account the life situation of every
Cameroonian person (Mbarga 2012). Yet, behind it are always the aforementioned
big questions of the possible organicity of his culture, and analogies with Western
culture. I once saw on TV a program in which quite young African boys from
Nigeria, 8 years old, spoke while fishing about how life was in the West. Their
reasoning was amazingly wise, mature, and right – from their point of view,
although it dealt with an issue which for them was so transcendental.
The lesson from all this is that we can successfully apply the idea of organicity
insofar as it does not become a reductionist model in which the primal, phenom-
enal, felt, lived-in realities are explained away by some abstract categories. Thus
ESC theory is definitely anti-reductionist.
10.12 Generation
However, the idea of organicity can take more sophisticated forms in various the-
oretical models going under the rubric of semiotics. For instance, the so-called
generative models, no longer so ‘fashionable’, are like that. Repeating the earlier
question about what culture looks like in an autopsy, one answer is that it is a
multi-level organic process in which deep, unconscious structures yield the more
superficial manifest structures. This is the Chomskyan tree model. Is all culture
like that?
The temptation to apply this model has always been there, and, among others,
the Greimassian parcours génératif was supposed to be like that. However, the
model taken to the extreme, as in the work by the theater scholar Kari Salosaari,
has turned out to be over-rational, awkward theoretizing in which we launch a
huge system in order to explain one cultural detail. Yet the heuristic value of such
a model remains, since we have to find an organization and a structure for our
semiotic observations. But I would hardly imagine that a generative model of Ira-
nian culture or Cameroonian society were reasonable enterprises. Moreover, gen-
erativism can be seen in philosophy, as well in the Heideggerian system, where
all is derived from the fundamental ‘Being’. Ontological semiotics can easily fall
into the trap of such generativism, albeit all the evidence might show that reality
is much more unpredictable and complicated, sometimes attaining the limits of
irrationality. Rather, the idea of levels of articulation would save our system of
multi-level culture from such over-rationalisations, i.e., by admitting that a new

articulation is possible at any level of culture.
10.13 Nature
Anyway, the idea of organic processes stems from the concept of nature. Even
Greimas had the notion of le monde naturel but there is nothing natural about
it; it was, rather, nature as opposed to culture but already completely semiot-
ized. I have dealt with this problem elsewhere. However, the historian of ideas,
Arthur Lovejoy, once made a list of what ‘nature’ as a concept contained, finding
19 different cases of nature; in fact, all cultural concepts: 1) nature as objects to
be imitated by art, 2) nature as empirical reality, 3) human nature, i.e., ordinary
human behaviour with its passions, 4) connections among facts, cause and ef-
fect seen as natural, 5) nature as a Platonic idea which is realized incompletely
as empirical reality, 6) nature as general type excluding particular traits of spe-
cies, 7) nature as average or statistical type, 8) nature as antithetic to man as his
works, i.e., that part of empirical reality to be touched by human art (= culture,
we could add here), 9) ‘nature’ as a system of evident truths, of properties of
essences, 10) intuitively felt as principles of taste or standards as statements on
what is objectively and essentially beautiful, 11) nature as cosmic order, whole
or half personified (mythologized) force, natura naturans, 12) such attributes as
uniformity, simplicity, economic use of means, regularity, nature as geometrizing,
irregularity, savagery, completeness, the richness of and manifoldness of content,
13) continuous development, 14) naturality as a quality of an artist, 15) self-ex-
pression without self-consciousness, 16) qualities which appear in ‘primitive’ art,
17) nature manifesting in the artist’s public, 18) universality and then unchange-
able art in thought, feeling and taste: what is always felt, what all understand
immediately and 19) familiar and close, natural as something which any indi-
vidual can directly enjoy (Lovejoy 1948).
This list in fact constitutes a negative definition of culture: culture is anything
that is not natural. This shares with our existential approach the point that these
categories are those used by subjects in real situations, and thus nature is not
pushed back into the status of some mystic unity. The list can show which kind of
concepts are leading our behaviour.
10.14 Rhizome | 203
10.14 Rhizome
Yet there are other theories which are perhaps less conspicuously based on the
nature metaphor, like the one by Deleuze and Guattari and their famous ‘rhizome’
model (Deleuze, Guattari 1987). Their idea was to make a vehement attack against
the organic tree model proposed by Chomsky. The tree model as binary thinking
was adopted by linguistics as its basic image, and this was a mistake: a tree is not
a rhetoric ‘image’ but just a ‘structure’; Deleuze himself regards all his concepts
as images and metaphors. For Deleuze, the tree image is totally wrong, since then
the idea of multiplicity is ignored. ‘Chomsky’s system has never reached under-
standing of multiplicity’ (ibid.: 5). A system of multiplicity is a rhizome; a rhizome
as a subterranean stem is totally different from roots and radicles . . . Chomsky’s
linguistic models still begin at a point S and proceed by dichotomy . . . semiotic
modes of coding (biological, political, economic, etc.) bring into play not only
different regimes of signs but also states of things of different status; in Chomsky’s
grammar, the categorical symbol S that dominates every sentence is more funda-
mentally a marker of power than a syntactic marker. Our criticism of the linguistic
models is not that they are too abstract but that they are not abstract enough,
that they do not reach the abstract machine that connects a language to the se-
mantic and pragmatic contents of statement . . . ‘A rhizome ceaselessly establishes
connections between semiotic chains, organization of power, and circumstances
relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles . . . There is no ideal speaker-
listener, any more than there is a homogeneous linguistic community . . . There is
no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language’ (ibid.: 6–7).
Deleuze’s reasoning has great fascination since it has a prophetic and declar-
ative tone, but what is a ‘semiotic chain’? What is mother tongue? Certainly not
S2/S1, i.e., social praxis, but something between M2/S2; it is half on the side of
Moi, unlike other languages learned later. Deleuze swears by multiplicity. There
are no points or positions in a rhizome – so the theory of ‘subject positions’ is also
denied here! – such as those in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines. What
would Kandinsky have said (Punkt und Linie zu Fläche)? We do not have units, only
multiplicities (Deleuze, Guattari 1987: 8). There is deterritorialisation insofar as
multiplicities are defined from outside. A rhizome may be shattered at a given spot
but it will start again. The rhizome makes a reference to DNA whose evolutionary
schemas would no longer follow models of arborescent descent. There is thus a
metaphorical link to biology, one might nowadays even speak of nanotechnology
whose most fervent defenders see it as a new universal system for resolving all the
problems of mankind, from technology to ecology. Another cultural object which
Deleuze ‘rhizomizes’ is the book. The book means deterritorialisation of the world,
but the world then reterritorializes the book. Follow the plants, Deleuze’s sermon
goes on: ‘Write, form a rhizome, increase your territory by deterritorialisation . . . ’

(ibid.: 11). Could this be also a political slogan, as has been shown by the recent
events in Europe? Make a map, not a tracing! This advice was once followed by a
semiotician trying to reach the Imatra semiotic congress by train from Helsinki.
He forgot to change mid-way and then called from the other side of the country
to the congress. ‘Why are you there and not here?’, he was asked. ‘The map was
wrong’, he answered.
Let us now ask how this would be linked to the existential theory of culture.
It is hard to believe that any subject would at all times live in his or her culture
as if it were a rhizome. Very quickly, even when moved to a totally strange envir-
onment, a subject constitutes his own Umwelt by identifying small signs around
him, by gradually creating his own territory. The first cultural act is to occupy
a space, says Corbusier. It is impossible to make a theory of ego, Moi/Soi, sub-
jectivity, based upon such a rhizomatic experience. It certainly reflects a quite
postmodern anguish amidst the multiplicity of ‘choices’ at an American super-
market, or in a market-oriented, consumption- and media-driven, internet society
in general. All is available and at the same time nothing, since without orientation
by a transcendental ego providing the concrete subject with the criteria of selec-
tion, judgement, evaluation and comparison, one is indeed lost in a rhizomatic
desert amidst our globalized world.
Yet even Deleuze has an aspiration towards that deeper level while talking
about machining assemblages, making the unfolding of semiotic chains possible.
However, this theory is certainly not existential in that it denies the subject any
possibility of agency as proposed in the British theory. Deleuze states: ‘A rhizome
has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing,
intermezzo . . . Where are you going? Where are you coming from? What are you
heading for? These are totally useless questions’ (Deleuze, Guattari 1987: 25). If
such fundamental questions are forbidden in his model, we cannot take his theory
as a model for an existential theory of culture. Rather, it reflects the feeling of
being lost amidst a huge metropolis, something like a Western traveller in Tokyo,
without any knowledge of their mother tongue, without any map, without any
familiar signs.
Nevertheless, later Deleuze has the courage to borrow unscrupulously from
linguistics the idea of articulation, particularly double articulation, and he claims
that the entire organism must be considered in relation to double articulation
(ibid.: 41). Then his system even reaches theology: ‘A stratum always has a di-
mension of the expressible . . . to express is always to sing the glory of God. Every
stratum is a judgement of God; not only do plants and animals . . . sign or express
themselves, but so do rocks and even rivers, every stratified on earth. The first
articulation concerns content, the second expression’ (ibid.: 42). Thank God there
10.15 Zemic/Zetic | 205
is no mistake here regarding the theory of André Martinet, and this may contain
echoes of Lévi-Strauss who shared with Deleuze the same belief in the stratifica-
tion of reality: geology, Marxism and psychoanalysis, all of these portrayed strat-
ified entities. Otherwise this view is not far from that of Oswald Spengler. So at
least on the discursive level, the return of the speculative theory seems possible
in contemporary debates!
10.15 Zemic/Zetic
Now we might go further and ponder whether our Zemic model with its internal
shift from Moi to Soi would mean the same as the shift from biology to psycho-
logy, and, moreover, to sociology and then to anthropology, or simply from nature
to culture. To what extent is the Zemic model a model of an ‘organism’, organic
growth, Bildung, culture in the sense of cultivation? To what extent does it in-
volve the Ruskinian idea of education or the principle of Kultur in the sense of
Kunsterziehung proposed by J. Langbehn, one of the founders of the aesthetic
education movement, a long time ago (1897)? There have been efforts to apply
it also to communities – for example, by Markku Sormunen – but to what extent
could we take ‘culture’ as just a more extensive Zemic construction?
If yes, what could it mean to talk about M1, or the ‘body’s’ primal corporeality,
the kinetic movement of a social group or collectivity – except in Wagnerian op-
eras where the chorus expresses this aspect magnificently – I refer, for instance,
to the chorus in Mastersingers or in Parsifal. In the latter when the ‘bodies’ of the
knights have enjoyed their wine and bread, they are refreshed and believe again
in their community, and turn again to being courageous. To what extent can we
speak of the identity of a group? With certainty and without artistic metaphors?
Within the Durkheimian organic or mechanical solidarity, to what extent can we
talk about the social practices of a group? And to do so even better than when
talking about an individual subject? And to what extent are there collective values
and norms, even better than for single persons? Yet immediately other challenges
rise up, such as the question: what is the relationship of these two Zemic models?
Or is the collective Zemic rather a Zetic, i.e., external, model to a single subject? Is
the subject always to be considered outside of his group, clan, tribe, sect, nation,
community? How does an individual Zemic entity communicate with its collective
Zemic group? If the collective Zemic group sends a message dealing with values
and norms, i.e., S1, in which mode does the individual Zemic react? By his body?
By his person? By his profession and role? By his individual values which may
differ from the group values? All combinations are possible. Could these commu-
nications or shifts among the modes be portrayed, for instance, by modal analysis
in the Greimassian sense, as ‘will, know, can’, etc. For instance, when a subject
is unable to realize a rule in his M1 or M2 because he is lacking the modalities of
‘know’ and ‘can’?
However, we may also note here that between the individual Zemic and the
collective Zemic there is a mediation, namely the dialogue between two individual
Zemic subjects. This is the theory proposed by Mikhail Bakhtin, in his ideas on
dialogue. Every subjects grows, lives and develops in dialogues with other mem-
bers of the group Zemic class. What happens at this level? Lévi-Strauss claims:
Qui dit homme, dit langage, et qui dit langage dit société. Thus we may again adopt
the Saussurean model of dialogue, of two Zemic worlds encountering each other:
Mr. A transmitting signs to Mr. B and the latter responding. Then we might say
that the theory of culture, as well as the existential one, must include this aspect
of communality and step out of its solipsistic framework.
10.16 Transfer
The dialogue model could also function well on the cultural level. This becomes
clear when we deal with so-called cultural transfers among different cultures, i.e.,
two collective Zemic units. A fine study about such an issue is the one by Michel
Espagne, Les transferts culturels franco-allemands (Espagne 1999). It is based on
the idea of national culture: France and Germany had to have first the idea of their
almost organic nature as cultures before any exchange, in any form, was possible.
In this sense there had to exist what Benedict Anderson has called ‘Imagined com-
munities’. For his theory the national culture is a typical case of an imaginary col-
lectivity which does not exist anywhere else than in the minds of certain groups.
This was made possible in Europe technically by printing books. By reading books
one could be in touch with huge communities without ever meeting them face to
face. In a certain sense, then, the nation is a ‘transcendental entity’; it is some-
thing which is absent but present in our minds. This principal absence does not
exclude its strong emotional impact and force when ideas such as brotherhood
are linked. People are then ready to die for it, as one can still see on any TV news
in our time. The nation thus would appear to be a typical cultural Zetic formation,
i.e., it is never Zemic as such, but can of course become Zemic any time when it is
actualized in the Dasein of the members of a group. Yet, in the case discussed by
Michel Espagne, that of France-Germany, the claim made is that the easiest model
for studying such transfers is the model of communication. However, here we
need to point out as a commentary the view expressed by Jaan Valsiner who, when
talking about cultural transfers, argues that the unidirectional scheme should be
replaced by a bi- or multidirectional or mutually constructive scheme. All par-
10.16 Transfer | 207
ticipants of the cultural transfer actively transform the cultural message. Thus
France influences Germany, Germany influences France, and even ‘third’ mem-
bers are included, such as England or Russia (Valsiner 2007: 36).
However, in the chapter Au-delà du comparatisme Espagne discusses several
principles of such issues which are interesting when juxtaposing two collective
Zemic entities, such as European neighbour nations (Espagne, op. cit.: 35–49).
First among them is that comparison presupposes cultural areas close enough
to enable one to pass over the specificities by applying abstract categories. The
main problem is then, as pointed out by Espagne, who does the observing! Very
often one only compares oneself to others. For instance, the notion of Bildung in
education has, for Germans, almost a metaphysical meaning, whereas French-
men and Englishmen do not even understand what is involved. Often compar-
ison takes place between the synchronic parallels of two cultures, without noting
their chronologies. History is easily forgotten. Comparatism opposes social groups
(i.e., two S2s) instead of emphasizing acculturation mechanisms. Comparisons
are for grounding territories. They concern objects (Zetic units) thought to express
identities, for instance national anthems. Comparison can exaggerate differences
instead of convergences. Very often a scholar’s comparison of two nations only
strengthens their nationalisms. I have earlier, in my postcolonial theory, noted
that nationalism emerges as a reaction against a threat from another nation, per-
haps imagined, i.e., a reaction against an attempt at subordination and coloniza-
tion. Then such an imagined community might have only a negative role and not
be considered an authentic phenomenon growing from the S1 values of a group
as such.
For instance, a nation may need to defend some totally physical qualities of
M1. To give an example, oriental people cannot stand the smell of soured milk
while Westerners do not notice such a smell because they use milk products.
Someone said that he can immediately distinguish a Finn in a Parisian street by
how he walks. When I wore a fur cap in the winter of Minnesota people admired
it but thought it was sign of being a Russian. In such a case a Zetic sign represents
the culture. Music, food, clothes, all these of course belong to such markers.
Yet some Zetic units and behaviours are elevated to such a high status of their
culture that they are called cultural heritages. They constitute foregrounded,
linguistically marked, cultural Zetic units which have to be remembered, pre-
served, maintained, fostered, in some cases even renewed. The carriers of such
heritages again apply their Zemic profiles to do so.
10.17 Alien-psychic
It is now time to return once again to transcendence. This ambiguous concept

undoubtedly also has a social interpretation, such as that by Alfred Schütz
and Thomas Luckmann in their The Structures of the Life-World (Schütz 1994),
representing the so-called understanding sociology, Verstehende Soziologie. They
give the notion quite an empirical and colloquial meaning by distinguishing three
types of ‘transcendencies’: small, middle and major. ‘Transcendental’ simply
means anything which is absent. However, Alfred Schütz presents quite profound
views on the notion in his treatise Der sinnliche Aufbau der sozialen Welt (Schütz
1993). He deals there with the philosophical problem of alien-psychic or Frem-
dseelig. In this view, the only certain thing is my own stream of consciousness,
Erlebnisstrom. He distinguishes two types of intentional experiences or acts: those
whose intentional objects are within the same stream of experiences as oneself. So
we might say – such intentional acts which take place within our Zemic model –
let us say, when one’s M1 addresses M2 or S1 is ‘talking’ to M2 or S2. In semiotics,
this would be called autocommunication. On the other hand, those intentional
experiences which are not there are transcendentally directed, for instance acts
directed towards intentional experiences of other ‘Ich’s’ or ‘I’s’. Not only are
transcendences intentional acts directed to others, but transcendent are, rather,
all experiences of the bodies of other egos, and even of my own body. So, what
kinds of acts are those directed towards the other’s experiences? It means that one
Zemic subject listens to another, and receives that person’s signs and messages,
leading us into quite ‘existential’ questions.
Arno Münster has noted in his study Le principe dialogique: De la réflexion
monologique vers la pro-flexion intersubjective (Münster 1997: 39), that, quoting
Martin Buber: ‘Only You, only the discovery of You, leads me to take consciousness
of myself’. So it is in encountering the alien-psychic that we become existential
subjects ourselves. As Schütz puts it: ‘this means that You and Me exist simul-
taneously, we coexist’. And coexistence means co-temporaneity, participating to
the same duration. We share the same Bergsonian temps de durée, one might add.
Nowhere else does this become so clear as when playing together with other mu-
sicians. An ensemble of three, four, five or more musicians’ ‘bodies’ must become
like one Zemic entity in order to be able to produce in a certain spatiotemporal
network a cultural artifact which is a composition, i.e., a particular Zetic entity,
by reacting to and interpreting its embedded M1, M2, S2 and S1 modes.
10.18 Conclusion
Next we have to turn back and ask ourselves whether we were able to answer the
questions posed at the beginning. Has such a thing as an ‘existential semiotic cul-
tural theory’ emerged from the previous observations and reflections? We might
at least gather here the essential principles of such an ambitious enterprise:
1) The new notion which the ESC theory tries to launch is transcendence
2) The ESC theory is an attempt to see and analyse issues from the inside, using
a model called Zemic which refers to four modes of Being
3) Agency: behind the theory is the idea of a subject as a transcendental ego,
who is capable of pursuing acts, making choices and enjoying freedom
4) The theory of ESC can be tested by empirical cases of cultural life and history
such as studies in cultural heritage
5) The theory is non-deterministic
6) There is a ‘linguistic turn’, in the sense that a new metalanguage is elaborated
to deal with transcultural, supra-rational and metacultural issues
7) Formal language is used to some extent, stemming from the semiotic square,
deontic logic and the grammar of modalities
8) The appropriate philosophical style is that of the continental and speculative
theory, yet the ESC theory is not a regress in the history of philosophy
9) ESC theory is non-reductionist, i.e., it emphasizes the phenomena as such.
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Part III: Lesser Arts
Chapter 11
A proposal for a semiotic theory of performing arts
11.1 General observations
Performance, in French exécution, Aufführung in German or perhaps even better:

Darstellen, means that something immanent is made manifest. Insofar as what is
performed is a text, i.e., the performance has a certain pre-established model or
starting point, what is involved is how this entity changes into some other mode
of existence, a kind of transformation. Those meanings which dwelled as implicit
in a text already can now burst into life and assume quite new properties. Some
art forms are based upon this, i.e., they are not yet what they should be before
this process. That is also called interpretation, if one wants to underline the fact
that the performing subject adds there something. In the theory of semiotics this
could be called ‘modalisation’ of a message or text (A. J. Greimas).
Altogether, the definition by Étienne Souriau remains valid: “Performance is
the material realization of an art work, and the performer is the one who enacts
it” (Souriau 2000: 703). Performing is hence something physic. It is not without
reason a musician or actor is compared some times to a sportsman. It is also typ-
ical that when one discusses with performing artists they do not speak about
spiritual aspects or interpretations, but rather about their physical bodies, in-
struments, etc.: “When I this morning woke up my back had some pain.”, “Al-
though I yesterday changed a new string to my violin, it is making some strange
noise.”, etc.
Moreover, Souriau emphasizes that in the so-called temporal arts – theater,
music, dance, cinema – one postulates their previous creation and the performer,
who is a different person than the author of a work. His/her task is to actual-
ize what the author proposes, although the ‘sketch’ of the creator be complex,
demanding and rigorous. Works can get many interpretations; in spite of a text
as pre-existing entity, it has to be rendered in blood and flesh. Often one needs
improvisation, when the view about one definite interpretation remains in the
background, especially in our time . Far from the idea that one would aim at one
precise and faithful performance the artist can always add there something new
and thus foreground his/her own creativity. Yet here one might like to remark in
the manner of Marcel Proust who in his speeches about theater art and perform-
ances by Berma (Sarah Bernard of course as her model), said that an artist should
be satisfied to serve as a window to the art work.
214 | 11 A proposal for a semiotic theory of performing arts
In the next, I would like to launch one new aspect and present a model for
analysis, which I suppose to be applicable to all performing arts. However, be-
fore it, I would like to make a panorama of the central principles of performance
philosophy, and of the categories which were already prepared by the reflections
of Souriau.
11.1.1 Skill
Performing can be interpreted in the light of concepts like competence and per-
formance, in the linguistic sense. Without a certain previously acquired skill or
technics there cannot be a decent performance. An actor, musician, circus artist
is presupposed to possess professional skill. One feels sympathy for an amateur
performer but in his performance normally the fun is at performer not so much
at listener. In turn, for professionals the divertissement is at the public, not at
performer who contrarily can suffer from stage fright, the imperfection of his exe-
cution, or then fulfils his task with a sovereign indifference as to his/her emotions.
The more skill, the less tension. On the other hand, the positive side of the tension
is that one is excited only about what one considers important and significant. In
general, being tensed or nervous stops when one realizes that his tension does
not bring any joy to himself nor to anyone else. Sometimes in the case of avant-
garde art the professionalism is almost forbidden, because it leads into routine,
mannerisms and clichés, wherefrom one just tries to get rid. But there are many
theories about what is the role of technical exercise in a performance, and training
of a performer. Jacques Février, the French pianist advised the student to repeat
same figure hundred times and reading newspaper at the same time. Some artists
exercise continuously, although they would have reached the top already. Some
think that an actor must train himself and body by hard physical stress. In theater
and cinema the technics of a performer is completely subordinated to the will of
the director.
11.1.2 Theory
Is there some method or theory so that by studying it one becomes a great artist?
There are, that is true, schools of performance, particularly in music for all instru-
ments and in singing but also in theater, beginning from bel canto to Wagnerian
speech song, from national violin, cello and piano schools to methods of dance
at Isadora Duncan and Laban and modern dance, not to mention Stanislavsky,
Meyerhold or Artaud. There are also available various schools of relaxation, al-
though what a tensed person is most frightened about is just to get relaxed. One of
the most promising and all-encompassing theories of performance as a corporeal
activity is certainly the prenatal style theory by Stefania Guerra Lisi and Gino
Stefani which they call Globalità dei linguaggi, since it brings together all sign
systems as a kind of coherent synesthesia (Guerra Lisi 2006).
There are also art theories which guide performance from the background, but
what is their relationship to the practice of performance? In Finland the semiotic
theory of actor’s work by Kari Salosaari is such one (1989); by applying it, a whole
amount of classical dramas were realized at the drama studio of Tampere Univer-
sity. There are structuralist schools of theater, psychoanalytic methods, psycho-
dramas, etc. To some minds too much theorizing makes the exercise of art prac-
tically impossible. One professor of literature was asked why he does not write
novels, albeit he had studied a lot of theory of narratives, whereupon he said: If
the trapeze artist starts to think about where he will step next, he will fall down.
Also André Helbo has pondered a semiotic theory of performing arts in his
work (Helbo 1987). To his mind the concept of a ‘text’ signifies in theater many as-
pects. For the first, the text itself, like drama, libretto, score, can carry indications
and references as to the staging. Either these ‘didascalies’ have been addressed to
an actor concerning details of acting or staging, lights, clothes, sound effects, etc.
. . . or to the reader, when they are not intended to be visible, or they have been
directed to the ‘implied spectator’.
The performance has to be defined according to Helbo as an enunciation
which takes place under the presence of the observer, in the context of theatrical
conventions. These conventions or codes determine a.o. transition from everyday
life to scenes on stage or spectacle. Spectacles have their own theoreticians from
Yuri Lotman to Tadeusz Kowzan. Lotman says that spectaclisation is the same as
narrativisation. It was common to provide the life with a plot, for instance like war
as spectacle in the 19th century Russia. When the normal life was monotonously
cyclic, then war, parades, etc. brought some alternation and excitement.
A theatrical situation is defined by Helbo as follows (op. cit.: 48):
body: the gesture of everyday life are detached from their ‘real’ context and transformed into
signs. Every performance contains such a process of semiotisation.
– such a semiotisation is due to the fact that a ‘drunk man’ is shown distinctly: ostension
determines the acting (one might add here: what is involved is the category of marqué,
marked).
– this foregrounding is not based upon any intention but is conventional
– the meanings thus created are manifold
According to Salosaari, the basis of the semiotics of theater is living man (Salosaari
1989: 61) – and to this I shall refer myself when I later launch my theory of
performance based upon the modes of being. Salosaari quotes the speech act
theory of Searle about locution, illocution and perlocution – what fits well to all
rhetorics (see Tarasti 2008: 2–27). When an orator speaks he pursues a speech act
and it has two dimensions: locution – the fact that one says something and what
is said, which again contains two aspects: the act of proposition and the act of
expression; illocution in turn means what is done when one says, and perlocution
refers to what is achieved by saying. For instance a teacher of solfeggio says: Let
us sing! This message includes all three aspects. Correspondingly in theater when
an actor makes an act of acting what is involved is at the same time the fact that
he/she is acting and what he/she is acting, and the end result is the ‘text’ of the
actor, for instance he acts Hamlet. It manifests what he does when he acts and
finally what he causes as a perlocution of his act, i.e., spectators are moved.
Yet when Salosaari goes to examine closer what a text of an actor implies, he
resorts to the semiotics of the Paris school of semiotics or Greimas’s theory, and ex-
tremely systematically. His illustration stems from Carlo Goldoni’s play Le Baruffe
ciozzotte 1760, its twelfth scene from its second act as acted and videofilmed in
the drama studio of Tampere University in 1971.
He launches the whole generative course of Greimas in order to clarify what
happens in the level of significations in a dialogue between two actors, Isidoro and
Checca. The result is concretized by the following diagram, where the boxes in the
middle represent acts of signification, such as to affirm, deny, doubt, persuade,
deceit, blind, reveal a fraud, interpret, confirm, etc. Behind them looms a complex
modal process at both actors and their dialogical interaction.
Methodically speaking the crucial observation here is – and what has a heur-
istic value for whole theory of performing arts – that the linear course of theat-
rical text is transformed into pluridimensional, polyphonic – what as early as
Roland Barthes said to be characteristic of theater. In this respect it is interesting
that when Isidoro keeps silent, he does not disappear at all but is present on
stage continuously, and interprets what Checca tells or the process of significa-
tion continues. I have brought this remark to the semiotics of music, in which
always happens the hierarchisation of a linear chain of signs, for instance at the
beginning of the Waldstein Sonata by Beethoven alternate or stay in a dialogue
two musical ‘actors’. What is an actor in such an abstract discourse as music is a
problem of its own, comparable to the poetic discourse; one may state that it is a
unit carrying meanings and thematic figures, in music most often the same as the
so-called ‘theme’) . In Beethoven when a theme or motif A has been heard in the
bass, it receives an answer from motif B in discant and then the actor A again ‘says’
something in a text and B answers. Thus the syntagmatic chain becomes an inner
dialogue. Motif A does not disappear anywhere when B occurs, it remains as a
memory in the consciousness of the listener or destinator. So motifs even in music
11.1 General observations
Figure 11.1: The dialogue by Isidoro and Checca interpreted by the method of Salosaari
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217
Figure 11.2: Musical actors in a dialogue at the beginning of Waldstein Sonata by Beethoven
modalize one other and actors have their inherent modal contents; moreover, the
interpreter, pianist can modalize the score in numerous different manners.
This may be the core of performance following the Greimassian theory.
11.1.3 Time
As Souriau underlined performing arts constitute temporalisation of a static text.

When it is gradually rendered observable by senses, subtle temporal strategies
are at the same time applied there. Of many elements of actor’s gesture language
most are dependent just on right timing. On the basis of Birdwhistle’s gestural
theories Salosaari has developed a list of various temporal gestures of an actor:
to elevate, to sink, to make denser, to decelerate, to accelerate, to expand, to di-
minish, to increase, to resolve, to sustain, to soften, etc. (Salosaari 2000: 8). The
American Alexandra Pierce has developed a theory of ‘expressive’ or ‘generous
movement’ which has the same idea (Pierce). The performer has to create for the
performed work correct temporal dramaturgy. What is involved is also to find the
above mentioned narrative level. Salosaari states rightly: “Narrative activity is a

kind of syntagmatic intelligence” (Salosaari op. cit.: 92). An artist can of course
anticipate it in his work itself like Sergei Rachmaninov who carefully counted
to which point in his work one should situate the dramatic climax. The correct
timing appears as certainty, not as hesitation. However, sometimes just uncer-
tainty can be an aspect of interpretation, as it has been told about conductor
Serge Koussevitzky and his manner to start a work: he only allowed his arms to
sink slowly. The musicians had to guess at which point they should begin, and
this made them particularly vigilant. Sometimes it is advised that the performer
has to rehearse in a remarkably slower tempo than in performance, this device
particularly used in music. Sometimes the composer gives the permission for a
tempo rubato, what does it mean to ‘steal time’? In the age of Romanticism, it
is was said that if time were stolen one did not need to give it back. In general,
musicians know that before the beat one in a bar one can slow down as much as
one wishes, but at beat one has to catch the basic pulse again.
Even if performing means to linearize an achronic text, or to put it in semi-
otic terms to syntagmatize, the problem of each performance is – when we put
consecutively tones, words, gestures – how one also creates hierarchies there. Per-
formance which is only a series of signs is without depth, expressivity and levels
of meaning, i.e., isotopies – which in a witty speech are always complex. This
aspect has been investigated by behaviorist methods by measuring and analyzing
already realized performance using tapes and recordings. Classical example from
a long time ago was La mesure des gestes by Paul Bouissac.
The British musicologist John Rink believes that secret lies upon the fact
how a musician shapes his performance, Do musicians ‘shape’ consciously or
unconsciously their performances? At least every one with a musician’s education
knows that form analysis is one of the most hated disciplines in all conservatories.
That form or shape revealed by a theoretician is not necessarily cognitively
that form or shape which the performer realizes and listener experiences. Mark
Reybrouck has studied cognitively a.o. the rhythms of Mahler’s symphonies and
obtained interesting results. John Rink again supposes that the logics of shaping
is essentially similar at all performers and creators, both in Beethoven as well
in Woody Allen. Rink distinguishes the notion of ‘performance motif’ which is
a different thing from a thematic motif in a form analysis. He has a.o. analyzed
the interpretation by Arthur Rubinstein of a mazurka by Chopin, and remarked
that on the performance level it manifests the form ABA in which sections A are
rhythmically irregular and B regular. Yet, why the middle section is regular? Not
necessarily in order to provide a criterion or standard to how a listener observes
and conceives the irregularity of sections A, but what is involved can also be
the negation of the basic irregularity of the whole work. In mazurka the accents
can vary on three different beats of a bar already following the genre tradition,
and the performer can vary more. Therefore: where is the basic isotopy of that
mazurka by Chopin, in relation to which we can either engage or disengage, to do
embrayage/débrayage.
In fact this reflection leads us to ponder the dimension of depth of a linear
performance ‘text’ and what is pertinent therein. In other words, which elements
one has to foreground and mark, which are pushed in the background as unes-
sential. Every performer knows this rule and particularly for works with difficult,
complex and rich textures. Rubinstein admitted that he never played all the notes
in Iberia by Albeniz, but picked up the essential ones. Only structural notes are
played. Heinrich Schenker was a music theoretician, who created his system of
analysis after all to help performers to distinguish structural notes from secondary
ones. I would add here that existential semiotics in turn enables us to recognize
the existential notes from non-existential ones and build the inner world of sig-
nification of the work. The problem with spectrogram analysis and other meas-
urements is that one does not always realize that the criteria of pertinence can
change along the performance. In fact, the creativity of the performance is based
upon the idea that these criteria are not fixed. A good example is Richard Wagner
as director of his own works. According to the eye-witnesses from Bayreuth such
as Porges and Fricke he never conducted his operas twice similarly. They were
changing all the time – and that is why Cosima’s efforts to maintain what was
the ‘authentic’ manner in Richard’s time were comical and stagnated the inter-
pretation of the whole drama into awkward stereotypies. Heinrich Porges wrote:
“Though everything Wagner did at the rehearsals – every movement, every ex-
pression, every intonation – bore out this principle of fidelity to nature one must
not forget that he was simultaneously handling the whole vast musico-dramatic
apparatus and endeavouring to convert it into a living breathing organism (Porges
1881–1896/1983: 3) . . . Yet all the extraordinary things Wagner did at the rehearsals
created the impression of having been improvised. It was as though everything he
demanded and he himself so eloquently demonstrated occurred to him in a flash
with complete lucidity just at that very moment” (op. cit.: 4).
On the other hand, Richard Fricke testifies: “Working with Wagner is ex-
tremely difficult, as he does not stick to one thing for long. He jumps from one
subject to another, and you cannot pin him down for one subject, which could
immediately find a solution. He wants to be his own stage director, but for this
detailed work, I may say he lacks all it takes, for his mind is focused on the
entirety, losing sight of details and forgetting how he had wanted things done the
day before . . . Wagner regularly speaks in an undertone, indistinctly, gesturing
with hand and arms, only the last few words of a sentence giving you any idea of
what he means . . . (Fricke 1906/1998: 32–33).
11.1.4 Emotions
Compositions, plays, poems, theater pieces are not yet anything before they are
interpreted. Although in the 20th century art a special aesthetic category of es-
pressivo inexpressive was elaborated, which meant the emotionless performance
of a work as it stood in the text, score, etc. (at Stravinsky and Prokofiev, see Vladi-
mir Jankélévitch 1961: 25–97), this has to be taken as the minus side of the inter-
pretation of all arts. In semiotics it is said that the text has to be modalized in a
performance (i.e., furnished with modalities of will, know, can, must and believe)
in order to make any impact. The interpretation by a performer is particularly in
abstract arts an important source of semantics. Jean Renoir required his actors to
read their roles totally expressionlessly, so that he could then as a director add
there the nuances he desired.
It was said above how the Greimassian semiotics became via modalities a
semiotics of passions. Yet to which extent and which emotions appear in a per-
formance is problematic. Do they directly appear as gestures? Horowitz said that
when it comes out of the face, it does not come out of the music. In the theory of
tragedy by Aristotle two emotions prevailed: horror and compassion. So on stage,
but how at performers? Especially in the education of performers there are a lot of
old-fashioned systems based upon dictatorship of a teacher or director, in which
the performer is subordinated to a discipline mixed with fear. Famous are Russian
ballet masters with their cruel criticisms or conductor divas. Koussevitzky could
shout to a cellist: You played wrong. But the musician said: I played exactly g and
a as in the notes. “No, the mistake was between the notes!” was the answer. The
idea of an authoritarian teacher is that the pupil is made to fear the teacher and
lesson so much that going on stage feels like nothing beside it. So one wins the
stage fright. Some are milder like Jorma Panula, whose principle in his conductor
class is: Help, but do not disturb!
Anyway, Stefania Guerra Lisi and Gino Stefani talk about emotonicità, a kind
of basic emotionality, which appears in the vital flux of human organism and
modulates into profound emotions. Furthermore they put the body into a certain
muscular tone which then manifests in the global sensoriality which they call
synesthesia (Guerra Lisi 2010: 63).
11.1.5 Intentional body
Performing is of course corporeal activity, but this has been misunderstood in

many theories and studies. What is involved is an intentional ‘soma’, not immedi-
ate physical body, although even it exists of course. Étienne Souriau spoke about
corporeal arts, whose material is human body: dance, theater, song. In this sense
playing is not only purely corporeal because a musician escapes behind his in-
strument, but on the other hand what he produces in his utterance is totally de-
pending also on corporeality. But it is intentional corporeality. How else could
one explain for instance functioning of a symphony orchestra? One hundred mu-
sicians can be for hours packed in the same space side by side under extreme
control – that is surely worse than working at a landscape office. This is possible
only because they forget their physical bodies partly when they shift into another
body. Although Proust would portray how a harpist picks up, tones from strings
as if they were stars in the sky, or the cellist handles his instrument between
his legs as if he were pealing cabbage, this occurs in the intentionality of the
primary body. Of course the musician never forgets his physical body. A wind
instrumentalist can have only some entrances in a symphony of one hour, but he
has to concentrate in his body on them so that his blood pressure heightens before
them and finding the right timing and tone is extremely stressful and physically
demanding.
Souriau speaks about corporeal expression but how erroneously goes re-
search which detaches physical corporeality from intentional and measures only
physical aspect and makes science and system of it. The basic unit of corporeal
expression is a gesture; that notion is naturally central to all estrade artists. Also in
abstract arts without immediate corporeality like in music, the notion of body has
become fashionable in the recent efforts to find the behaviorist basis for music.
According to Souriau, the gesture or gestus means bodily movement, especially
that by arms and hands. Gesture is in the focus at actor, dancer and speaker or
orator. Gestures have both expressive and indicative functions. Gestures provide
information, show, imitate, let them be spontaneous or codified. Arts utilize
gestures for the aesthetic expressivity by emphasizing their form, arabesque like
line, rhythm, etc. The gesticulation again is based upon exaggerated gestures – in
semiotics one would say on marked or foregrounded gestures. Yet it is particular
that the Dictionary of the Body by CNRS (Le dictionnaire du corps, 2008) does not
mention the notion of gesture at all. It only speaks like Marcel Mauss about
technics of body. Yet in music to find out the correct gesture in music or its
signifier and combine it to physical corporeal gesture is quite essential. Jules
Gentil at École Normale de Musique said that piano playing is science des gestes
and had in principle two movements: pousser/tirer (to push and draw). They
formed as he said, the ‘breathing of the hand’. Very often one uses in performing
arts metaphors referring to body – thus confirming the theory by Lakoff on the
origin of all metaphors in our bodies.
11.1.6 Unpredictability
Insofar as performance is dialogue in the sense of Mikhail Bakhtin, one of its most
important characters is that its end result can never be anticipated. Souriau re-
marks (Souriau 1990: 703) that the “work looks less and less anything determined
in the sense that performance would realize it definitely”. Hence performance is
never mechanic ‘translation’ of a text into other languages, for instance from a
text to tones, gestures, etc., but it is always typical that performance permits dis-
turbances, ‘noise’ in the information theoretical sense. It is expressly presumed
that performer adds something new to a text in his interpretation in order to make
it living. Therefore tunes realized by computers perplex us by their machine-like
quality. In any case disturbances are possible and even desirable and that is why
people still want to go to concerts, theaters, opera to follow a live performance.
I once asked a composer to come with me to a concert Beethoven’s Eroica fea-
turing in the program but he answered: I have already heard it. In performance
always opens some new aspect which could not be expected before. Yet how a
performer obtains a contact with the audience is a problem of its own, as well as
contact in general in human communication. Our Italian colleagues Gino Stefani
and Stefania Guerra Lisi have arranged symposia on it and published works about
contact. What they say is of most profound meaning to any performer. On the other
hand, the origin of Bakhtin’s notion of the dialogue was in a kind of disputes. He
stayed after the Revolution in Nävel, where public disputes on common topics,
such as the existence of God were organized. There Bakhtin realized that no idea
or concepts existed anywhere else than first in a dialogue, as an ideologeme or as
a belief in the world of the speaker.
Nevertheless, the unpredictability and unforeseeability of performance is
also connected with it physicality. Performer can never be 100 percent sure that
the physical aspect of performance succeeds; it is like one young student returned
home from entrance examination of a conservatory crying and telling: Otherwise
it went fine but fugue was cut! The first imperative of a performer is naturally that
the show must go on. The chain of communication must not break.
11.1.7 Schein
At the end the dialectics of Schein and Sein, appearance and being constitutes the
basis for the evaluation of the reality of a performance. Performance is always
juxtaposed with a text as its starting point; to some mind performance has to
be always faithful interpretation of the departure text. Being in the ground of
performance is, so to say, the authentic form of an art work, which a performer
either reaches or not. In order to attain it he has to study abundantly its struc-
ture, meanings, isotopies and background, history, aesthetics, artist’s biography,
etc. Yet then one easily forgets that performance is not reconstruction. The so-
called authenticity does not mean that performance were an obedient copy of
some original. This has been tried but ignoring then what all had happened in
time between the creation of the work and its new emanation, and this all cannot
be deleted. Between the original and a copy, i.e., performance, intrudes our image
on authenticity whereby at the end the performance is evaluated. We do not go to
theater, opera, concert to listen to historical documents of ideas and emotions by
people long time ago but we go there because the work to be performed has as
it is said ‘ästhetische Gegenwärtigkeit’, it is talking to us here and now. By this
we do not deny that there was not an aspiration towards authenticity as an ob-
ligation, but as early as François Couperin said in the 17th century: Nous écrivons
différemment de ce que nous exécutons (we write differently from what we play).
The notation is only starting point:
our image of
authenticity
performance as a
authentic text reconstruction or
interpretation
Figure 11.3: The authentic performance as interpretation or reconstruction
However in the opera performances nowadays the idea is prevailing that director
builds his own work upon the original text, which disappears as mere title and
pretext to render ideas of stage director. This is true particularly in recent Mozart,
Verdi and Wagner interpretations. Harry Kupfer changes the end of Parsifal so that
Amfortas dies and Kundry is married with Parsifal, Roman Hovenbitzer lets Elsa
survive with Gottfried, etc. Recently in the Flying Dutchman the main protagon-
ist is not saved but remains in his dammed boat after Senta’s suicide. The stage
director assumes too much the average viewpoint of contemporary spectator and
transforms the plot of the opera, so that it becomes compatible with values and
ideas of our time. Then one forgets that in opera also music has been written to
express certain semiotic universe of meanings, if narration is changed, one should
change even the music. it may occur that something happens inside and music is
contemplative and internal. However, director puts the scene outside although the
music remains the same. Like in Doktor Faust by Busoni, in its Teatro Comunale
version in Bologna in 1985 Faust was made an alpinist instead of a scholar amidst
his books. Music and text constitute a close dialogue – and director changes it
polemically so that singers shout to each other from extreme ends of stage.
Performance is always representation. Behind it looms le monde naturel, the
reality, but it is positioned at the distance of one step from it. It is like the German
philosophers said Schein, appearance, manifestation. Performance is always a
second degree reality. Therefore the expression ‘larger than life movie’ may sound
tempting. Performance is communication of communication as Ivo Osolsobě said.
How we should interpret a situation in which an actor acts sleeping on stage and
falls asleep. Spectacles are also representations although they set on stage values
and ideologies of spectators. Once I brought an Iranian student to an opera per-
formance; he had never seen opera before. It was Boris Godunov by Mussorgsky
and in its second act in the monastery a certain protagonist Grigory is masked
as a monk. The student at my side could not exclaim aloud: But that is Grigory!
From the time of Mozart on German opera houses had signs in the audience with
a text: Mitsingen verboten (Forbidden to sing together). But it is just in the ideo-
logical aspect of performance where it blends together with reality, it becomes
a theater ruling over one’s life, whose models are brought to real life like Verdi
operas during Risorgimento, or spectacles of the Soviet Union, Third Reich and
China of Mao.
Yet, in a certain sense one can say that the semiotic theory of translation con-
cerns closely performing, since one really translates there one reality into another,
for instance visual notation or text into gestures, sounds, tones – or a transform-
ation takes place into quite a particular world of Schein.
On the other hand, the realization of the Schein character of the performance
leads into recognition of its play function, what influences its quality. The life
work of anthropologist Anthony Seeger has been the filming and recording of
rituals of Suyá Indians of Xingu river at Mato Grosso. However, ultimately he was
brought himself into the ritual with his cameras. Indians were allowed to look
at their own performance of thousands years old ritual. This amused them a lot
and they started to joke in front of the camera and improve their performance,
and filmed at the end themselves. Accordingly, they did not subordinate into any
anthropological object as an example of stone age man’s rites, but they moved at
once from the archaic to the ethnosemiotic age.
In any case, the desire for Schein, to see performance or the intention can be
on spectator’s side so strong that the following holds true: the most important dra-
mas, cinemas, music works, etc. are those which one has never experienced,
seen, heard, followed. We have only wanted to receive them, but for some reason
it was not possible, but we were forced to imagine them. When I was a small boy
the Finnish National Theater had Julius Caesar by Shakespeare in their repertoire.
At that time there was a vitrine on the front wall of the theater with photographs
from the performance. I was too young to go to see the performance, and so I made
my image of it only with the help of those black-and-white photos. The rest I had to
imagine on the basis of what I heard from my elder brother about the performance.
I heard that particularly impressive had been the scene in which amidst Caesar’s
triumph an oracle appears on stage and says: Beware the Ides of March! This scene
was on a photo in the wall of the theater and it seemed to be even more impress-
ive than the moment when Brutus slays with his dagger Caesar – namely in the
fantasy of a boy. In the same way I became a Wagnerian after one performance
of Parsifal when I saw it as 12 years old and after having received three records
(which one German Wagnerian had sent to me after having heard of the distant
young admirer of Wagner) and after one arrangement for piano namely the quire
of the Pilgrims from Tannhäuser. All the other I could only read from books and
hear occasionally and seldom from the radio. So Wagner was for me more or less a
fictive entity. The music imagined in this way was probably much more impressive
that the one really heard. Music is not in the sounds and tones but behind them.
The reality of performance is always vanishing and susceptible to oblivion.
From all the quantity of performances we have seen, what has remained in our
minds? Probably only a few star moments. Even if the reason can be in the
situation itself, wherefore we recall them. Like Boris Asafiev, composer and music
scholar, contemporary to M. Bakhtin, said, we remember from performances
memoranda or moments or gestures, figures, attraction points (the notion by
Altti Kuusamo, a Finnish visual semiotician), or other; from them a proper living
artistic culture is built. Culture has always a memory and always decides which
texts are remembered and which not. Yet, performers greatly influence by their
modalisations what particular points in work we do remember. For instance, I
remember how at a school age I saw in TV the tragedy Daniel Hjort by Julius
Wecksell, a Finnish poet, and one reply from it, the phrase by a lady with a
black scarf: Och detta hat är jag. (And this hatred is me.) Hologrammically one
element may stay to represent the whole art work. I also remember Zarah Leander
from Cirkus Peacock at Linnanmäki, Helsinki. She sang. Vill du se en stjärna,
se på mig. (Do you want to see a star, look at me.) She appeared on stage on a
raising platform as a great diva, yet having already seen her best days, only now
I realize how humiliating it may have been for a big star to perform in so vulgar
environment after all previous. From the staging of Uncle Vanya by the legendary
Finnish stage director Eino Kalima only one memorandum remained sounding
from the end of the play: . . . and then we shall rest . . .
Nevertheless, there are avant-garde performances which force spectators to
the spectacle and which consciously break the limit of representation formed by
the ramp. Some years ago an experimental drama was realized at the Theater
School in Helsinki. I went to see it because the young actors told me that it applied
my existential semiotic theories. However, one of the young dramaturgists warned
me: remember to ask a ticket to the audience which stays passive. So I did and
with full reason since the active part of the audience had to go on stage to dress
in plastic coats, and others threw upon them juice and cream cake.
11.2 An existential semiotic theory of performance
After these preliminary reflections I want to launch one new theoretical model,
which I try to apply to the performing arts. What is involved is the newest elabor-
ation of my existential semiotic theory or model with four moments, a ‘semiotic
square’, which articulates our subject and his/her being by two aspects, which
may be called Me and Society, or Moi and Soi, and four interpretations of the
philosophical aspects of being. I shall not start here to report the philosophical
background of this theory (there is a large article forthcoming in Oxford Dictionary
of Psychology); I am only satisfied to argue that in that four-part model, which
origin lies in the Greimassian semiotic square but which deviates also essentially
from it since it is transformed into a dynamic movement symbolized by letter ‘Z’,
those four aspects are body, person (identity) , social practice, and values and
norms (see Figure 11.4).
For the simplicity I have numbered these four cases as M1, M2, M3 and M4,
and S1, S2, S3 and S4 according to which direction one is going in the model: from
a concrete, sensual body towards abstract norms and values, or from these intelli-
gible categories towards their gradual exemplification and corporealisation. I con-
sider these two movements the essential tensions of the ontological semiotics.
Here the signs are seen insofar as they express a.o. in performance these four in-
stances from the inside or emicly, so to say. One of my students invented that these
signs could be called ‘zemic’ signs, or ‘z’ stems from this course of tension, and
‘emic’ refers to the theory by Pike meaning the internal aspect (see Figure 11.5).
The hypothesis behind this model is the following: there is no performing
utterance which would not be based to some extent on, would not refer to, mark
or foreground some of these four cases. One can always analyze and make them
explicit regardless of the genre of performing. How these modes of being, and cat-
MOI
primary body person, identity
(chotic, kinetic)
social practice, abstract values and

institutions norms
SOI
Figure 11.4: The Z-model of our mind
MOI
M1 (S4) M2 (S3)
S2 (M3) S1 (M4)
SOI
Figure 11.5: The Z-model specified
egories of Moi and Soi manifest takes place via various degrees of affirmation and
negation. Even in the model of Salosaari the central point were the ‘boxes’ which
portrayed these modal operations: denial, affirmation, doubt, persuasion, etc.
Yet in the existential semiotic model what is affirmed, denied, persuaded, etc.
are just these four superimposed instances. Note that the first letter indicates the
dominant modes and the one in parentheses the mode less apparent. Upon this
basic ‘ontology’ are built other modalities such as:
M1 M2
‘will’ ‘can’
S2 S1
‘know’ ‘must’
Figure 11.6: The Z-model with modalities
and the new existential sign categories pre-, act- and post, endo-, exo-, pheno-,
geno- and qualisigns.
I do not discuss right here the essential notion of transcendence, which still
radically enriches this semiosis.
In any case, if one thinks of the performer himself and his career and devel-
opment it can be articulated with this model in two directions. For the first there
is the body with its innate inclinations which by education, learning, dialogicity,
etc. develops into permanent identity of a person. This person with his physical
and corporeal properties starts to search for a proper profession, or if he/she has a
body good at motion, perhaps for dance, if it is verbal body, then perhaps actor, if
it has a good voice, then singer; if he has good lungs, teeth and musicality, he may
become a blow instrumentalist; if he has good motorics in hands then pianist, if
good sense of rhythm then percussionist, etc. Altogether, one is shifted here from
M1 to M2. Furthermore, when he/she develops in this vocation further, he/she is
finally able to express on the level of S2, i.e., in a role in an institute, or practice
the deepest values of S1, his community.
Correspondingly, if the value of Soi is the beauty in gestures, this principle
may concretize in a society for instance as a ballet school and institution. It re-
cruits to itself proper ‘bodies’ and persons, i.e., those who have the required mo-
torics, sense of gestural language, aestheticity, outlook and person, for instance
perseverance, goal-directedness, etc. So certain persons are selected to realize
the values of the Soi; moreover, this is preceded by corporeality as such in flesh,
sensuality, etc. or M1. To which extent this process takes place to either direction
by itself, automatically, or ‘organically’, and to which extent it has to be helped
all the time and supported in a dialogue with teachers, masters, maestros, etc.
is a problem in itself. Or as one acknowledged art teacher crystallized his life
experience: Some realize, some don’t.
However, from this model new methodical challenges follow. For the first,
obviously signs which appear in each mode or M1, M2, S2 and S1 are perhaps
partly ‘same’, partly different. Most often one may think that they get transformed
in some way, for instance a gesture of M1, done by some body spontaneously,
becomes via gradual habit a part of the person M2, from that one it develops
perhaps into a genre sign in some social practice, for instance in a speech of a
rhetor, ballet, playing, etc. Ultimately, sign gets sublimated into a certain aes-
thetic, ideological or other value. For instance, also silence is a gesture, pause. It
can be a sign of M1, taciturnity, speechlessness like among autists (see particularly
studies by Stefania Guerra Lisi and Gino Stefani) , it grows into character in M2,
and furthermore into a trait of certain role. In the opera Peter Grimes by Benjamin
Britten the hero is unable to defend himself verbally with fateful consequences.
Speechlessness can appear as a dramatic pause done by an actor or musician, and
finally silence can be a cultural feature and represent as value the tacit knowledge
in a culture in which speech is not appreciated. If each mode of M1–S1 has its own
signs, then how in them manifest pre-, act-, post-, quasi-, endo-, exo-, pheno-,
and genosigns – are they then a kind of supersigns which overcode those lower
level signs and above all put them into the state of continuous becoming? Some
gesture can be still presign in M1 whereas in M2 it has become already an act sign,
and respectively on Soi level when it is imitated, it has become a post-sign. The
aforementioned question of signs proper to each mode can be also put as follows:
are there purely corporeal, personal, institutional and normative signs? Let
us think of g-signs (Thomas A. Sebeok) or gestures: we are in a ballet following the
Swan Lake. The movement of the wings of swan imitated by arms and hands is a
sign of M1. But it can be done differently when it is pursued by Margot Fonteyn
or Ulanova or Plisetskaya or in the case of the Black Swan by Muhamedov or
Baryshnikov, when it becomes a sign of M2, i.e., the whole personality of a dancer
is included. Ballet has its particular codes, how it should effectuated following its
rules, and then the gesture is ballet: S2, and at the end it has its aesthetic message
together with music and plot: it is tempting, soft, sensual, fateful (see Figure 11.7).
Altogether, in the problem of how one species of signs becomes another,
we distinguish three cases: 1) there are signs which pass through all the modes,
2) there are signs whose Z-movement stops in one phase or mode, and 3) there are
signs which are valid in only one mode.
In any case the situation is such that signs belong to three worlds: natural
world or ‘reality’ (which is always already semiotized, i.e., le monde naturel as
Greimas said), narration or the world of the text, and its representation in time
and place via actors, i.e., performance (see Figure 11.8).
M1 M2
'R S
iRZ o r'UZ
i'o lii
l[ adSxR
£ )
A‰SS =¦xYYn
zAAe± :t{{A
onxx lHx
S1 M2
Figure 11.7: Signs representing each mode
natural world narration performance
M1 S2 M1 M2 M1 M2
S2 S1 S2 S1 S2 S3
Figure 11.8: Three worlds of performance
Moreover, a crucial methodical point here is that we have to be able to read these
‘worlds’ transparently, so to say, through each other, or they exist simultaneously.
This interpretation may be helped by an analogy from Lévi-Strauss’s mythical
model or different readings of the myth of Oedipus via its various versions:
M1 M2
M1 M2 S1
M1 M2 S1
S2 S1
Figure 11.9: The reading of Z-model via its different versions

Furthermore inside each world holds true that M1, M2, S2 and S1 appear always
at the same time side by side or superimposed. By which method we are then
able to read such polyvalent texts with complex isotopies? Such a methodology is
needed as a kind of X-ray of signs. One major criticism against semiotics has been
in general that it has been satisfied to first classify signs into certain types and
then search and name for each its proper token or exemplification. For instance
‘icon’ is such a label: such and such sign: well here we have an icon! . . . one states
when one encounters such a phenomenon. Yet this means most often enormous
truncation, simplification of the reality, schematization since no sign is only icon
or index or pre-sign or quasi-sign or endo-sign etc. but represents many sign cat-
egories at the same time. When one chooses only one sign species to portray the
act of signification, one pushes aside a whole quantity of other sign species, it is
often also an ideological choice, the richness of signs is reduced into one domin-
ant idea, ears and eyes are closed to other meanings. Hence the new method must
be based upon a new reading manner in which the levels of the reality, modes of
being, worlds from M1 to S1 are present. On which basis shall we make a selection
in favour of one sign?
Accordingly, I propose four readings: M1, M2, S2 and S1 and moreover inside
each mode there can be particular signs in the vertical dimensions as relations
of type signifier/signified, sa/sé – and in linear, consecutive dimension or signs
unfolding from each other, signs becoming signs, signs which are noch nicht, not
yet signs or in the ultimate case utopian signs in the sense of Ernst Bloch. Which
method then were able to take into account this transparency of sign, the super-
positions, and its multileveled nature, representing the state in which they appear
really in our lives, in the Dasein? When I next scrutinize nearest the ‘third world’ of
the signs, or performance, one aims there for inferring from the face of an actor,
intonation of the voice, gesture, etc. those many levels and for interpreting the
meaning as a consequence from their joint impact upon us; only then does a sign
appear to us as fait total social (Marcel Mauss) . . . and at the same time as fait total
individuel or fait total subjectif (which for us is body and person).
Yet if we organize the aforementioned levels into a generative course, we no-
tice that often in practice (i.e., performing texts – dramas, compositions, ballets,
cinemas) the aesthetic idea consists of these levels falling into conflict among
each other’s. For instance, corporeality meets resistance from the norms of society
or a value of society cannot be realized since a person of a protagonist deceives it,
i.e., is not worthy of some idea, or some person never obtains the profession which
he should get, i.e., the shift from M2 to S2, etc. So it is on the level of narration
but the same concerns also the performance, representation in time. Film director
puts by purpose to a role a person, who deviates from other ‘levels’ regarding M1
and M2. Greta Garbo, the Swedish beauty is put to play in Ninotchka a KGB agent.
Monsieur Hulot with his clumsy properties of M1 and M2 is situated into markedly
conventional and limited spheres of Soi amidst protagonists representing it, just in
order to create contrast and comics. In the Journal d’un curé de campagne, Bresson
puts in the side of a spiritual young priest a prosaic substantial older priest, or two
different M1:s. In La règle du jeu by Renoir the tragedy occurs finally at an inno-
cent, and comical side person, who falls victim of an accident, shot by a jealous
servant as a wrong person. Marilyn Monroe’s M1 (sensual blond) combined with
a naïve character as M2 is placed in the hard American gangster world and its
Soi. In Rossellini’s neorealist film Germany in The Year Zero, the distanciation is
done by music, atonal avant-garde sonority which assumes a psychodiegetic role
portraying the chaotic mind of a young boy or childish M1 is joined with musical
signs of S2 and S1 in their ‘negative’ form. (The music serves here as a transcending
device like the journal intime of the priest in Bresson.)
On the other hand, our model does not need to be applied with school-like
systematicity as Greimas’s generative course.
11.3 Performance in various arts
11.3.1 Performance of the text
Let us begin with improvisation. In this case, no previous normative text or nar-
rative obliges one to faithfulness; rather, the text emerges only in the performance
itself. Some consider improvisation a source of freedom. Mostly, however, the im-
provisation involves an enactment of models adopted from an earlier text on the
basis of a grammar learned by heart, as, for instance, when an artist is encouraged
to improvise a fugue from a given theme, or when a speaker is asked to improvise
a speech about a given subject. Sometimes a performance seems improvised on
the level of appearance, Schein, so natural, immediate, and easy, as if without any
premeditation; but basically it is the result of detailed planning and preparation.
In turn, performances often prove to be extraordinarily stereotypical in avant-
garde art, even in so-called aleatoric, or “chance”, music.
Another case is “theatrics”, in the sense of staging a play, opera, and the like.
Are theatrics a performing or creative art? Whichever the case, it is nevertheless
constituted by some text, for instance a play, which the stage director interprets.
But if it is a creative art, then it is a performance only insofar as it is a living tem-
poral process. For example, sometimes a director overlays his own art work upon
an original one, perhaps even destroying a good deal of the latter’s intentions
with his own desires – for instance, when he seeks to shift an historic drama
into modern times. The motive or pretext here, of course, is to bring the work
closer to a contemporary receiver, but in reality such staging belies an aspiration

to foreground oneself as an artist. In Souriau’s (2000) Dictionary of Aesthetics we
find a theoretical legitimization: the mise en scène as the work of a stage director.
Legitimate or not, during such a process the original text and plot are often trans-
formed unscrupulously.
The stage director is an independent artist who creates a performance from a
previously existing text. He provides the performance with a meaning he thinks
essential, and employs actors whose acting he totally controls, while exploiting all
the scenic techniques available. Thus he creates a spectacle of which he is master.
Yet compared to other arts, his own is ephemeral and evanescent (Souriau 2000:
1014). Here the world of the performance is as justified as the world of the text is.
It is in fact a new text, which other stage directors can then imitate.
The problem of the performance is as follows: the original text to be performed
can be analyzed in the Z scheme, with M1, M2, M3 and M4. As I tried to show in
my recent analysis of Schumann’s Fantasy op. 17 for piano, those modes of being
are levels in the text – which, however, are not interconnected as in an organic
process as may be revealed in Schenkerian or Greimassian analysis. In fact, those
levels can occasionally come into conflict with each other, which is remarkably
enriching for the interpretation of a text (Tarasti 2012: 141).
To continue: the “performance text” of a text functions by following the same
four stages; yet how the original narration M – the physical kinetic energy – ap-
pears as the M1 of a performance naturally depends on which art we are con-
sidering. There are concepts that pass through various levels, such as gesture,
rhetorical figure, genre and so on. Gesture can be a physical and spontaneous en-
tity of narration in M1, which the text evokes most directly; for instance, in musical
timbre, rhythm, and other elements. By contrast, the gesture of the performance
of M1 lies in its realization; for instance, a singing quality of the violin, the bodily
gesture of an actor, his “kinesics” (Salosaari 1989). Yet a gesture can also be a
performer’s mannerism, part of his personality (M2); for instance, the martellato
technique of Arthur Rubinstein, Glenn Gould’s humming, the on-stage gesture of
a great actor or singer, by which his admirers recognize him/her. Moreover, a ges-
ture can stem from the universe of Soi as a feature hidden in a genre or rhetorical
system, such as the gesture of a leitmotif in film music.
Not only may the music of a film be analyzed with our zemic model. The film
itself, as performance, responds to our analytic criteria. This we hope to show in
the following.
11.3.2 Film performance-analysis
Jean Renoir and Jacques Tati

In this regard, let us first consider the film La Règle du jeu by Jean Renoir (1894–
1979). The main intrigue arises from a conflict between the worlds of Moi and Soi.
This involves modes of Soi as rules and codes of behavior among different types
and social classes of French society; and on the other hand, how these modes of
Soi (S) are broken by the force of passions, that is to say, by what protagonists
concretely and physically do on the levels of M1 and M2. The same idea appears
in the films of Jacques Tati (1907–1982), in an even more grotesque and comedic
sense, in order to parody the aforementioned rules and character of the Soi. As
early as in La Bruyère’s treatise, Characters, we find various grotesque figures
of social life, persons who are always playing a certain role. In Tati, the types
of S2 are represented by generals, fathers-heads of families, restaurant keepers,
waiters. The essential stylistic device is the obscure dialogue: the spectator cannot
at all distinguish what is said, but can hear only the gesture of the voice, le geste
de la voix.
Figure 11.10: Jean Renoir
Aki Kaurismäki
Later, Aki Kaurismäki (b. 1957) experiments in his films with a contrary gesture of
the voice. His famous dialogues go to the other extreme: the protagonists speak so
distinctly, use such overly punctilious grammar, and show such deadpan expres-
sions that serious situations are often rendered into comical ones. Kaurismäki’s
actors are also totally gestureless types from Finnish or French culture. (For in-
stance, Kaurismäki once chose Matti Pellonpää for a film simply because he had
“the glance of a dog”.) In his films there prevails a rebellion against the rules of Soi.
The rules of society (S1) are far away; the characters have become alienated from
them, and their behavior on the level of M reveals a moral code other than that
of the “official” S1 and S2 of their society. Kaurismäki plays with these levels and
with the cultural competence of the spectator. Toward the end of the movie Man
Without a Past, for example, the miserable homeless persons who have fallen off
the roster of society start to dance when an elderly woman officer of the Salvation
Army sings a well-known Finnish tango tune. For a non-Finnish spectator this
female figure is only an actress of the M1 level: an old, wrinkled, worn-out lady.
Her face carries so many traces of a lived life that she is also a person on the M2
level. Every Finn, however, recognizes that this is a stunning appearance of the
long-famous Finnish singer, Annikki Tähti. From behind the face of M1 steps the
figure of this face as S2, and behind it also S1: the old, humanistic Finnish culture
glimpsed as a moment of nostalgia.
Figure 11.11: Aki Kaurismäki
Ludwig II of Bavaria
Looking at the same narrative protagonist and its realizations by different direct-
ors, we come to see how modes of performance can radically change the narration.
Ludwig II (1845–1886) appears as the principal actor in films by Visconti, Syber-
berg, and Kätner. The first two films are well-known; the latter, less known, dates
from the year 1954. Kätner’s Ludwig is a romantic hero, and this film follows the
types of “Sissi movies” (about Princess Elisabeth of Austria), yet is impressive in
its own genre and against the background of the historical narrative. Of course, the
most striking of such figures is the Ludwig in Carl Froelich’s movie La vita di Wag-
ner from 1913. Though his gestural expressions, and those of the other protagon-
ists as well, are perhaps overly salient, “marked” – following the genre tradition
of the time – they nevertheless display a culturally credible kinesics, evoking the
time before the First World War. In contrast, Visconti starts from the demoniacal
nature of his actor, which does not necessarily jibe with history and with what
we know about Ludwig. Visconti’s realization nevertheless produces a fascinating
narrative subject. He is portrayed as alienated and disturbed, a neurotic whose
life is scrutinized in opposition to that of “normal” persons. Syberberg, in turn,
takes an even greater distance from the historical narrative, and determinedly so.
He creates his own surreal Ludwig, which proves surprisingly convincing also on
the level of Moi. The king does not need to shout, yell or rage, since he is a king;
it suffices when he whispers: he is listened to in either case. The loneliness of
Ludwig is also subtly foregrounded in Syberberg’s rendition.
Figure 11.12: Ludwig II
11.3.3 Varieties of actor/actress, musician, dancer
Now I intend to study different interpretations done by the same actor or per-
former. In this way we can see their development over time.
Max Lorenz
The German opera singer, tenor Max Lorenz (1905–1975), enjoyed a long career
as a Wagner performer, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, and was the only
one from the Bayreuth stars of that period to be permitted to continue at post-
war Bayreuth. The secret of his performer profile was the conflict between the
Italianesque, bel canto quality of his voice and a figure emanating from German
mythological opera. In spite of his German-ness, Wagner found Italian bel canto
to be no problem at all. In his essay “What Is German in Music?” he in fact wrote,
as early as at the time of his Mastersingers, that Germany had received singing
from Italy. He accepted bel canto on the levels of M1 and M2, but detached this
technique from the genre tradition of Italian opera (S2). He transferred it to the
emotional peaks of his myth operas, since this technique made such a profound
impact on spectators and listeners on the levels of M1 and M2. The tenor Lorenz
was an ideal Siegfried type, who fulfilled the Soi requirements of German culture
in the physical sense on the level of S1.
Lorenz’s mastery soon became apparent, and his recordings came out as early
as 1927 in Berlin. His recording of Siegmund’s Winterstürme wichen dem Wonne-
mond constitutes the best example of that aria that exists, theoretically speaking.
M1 M2
S2
Z S1
Figure 11.13: a: Max Lorenz; b: His existential profile as an opera singer
Why is it so exquisite? Can our model also help to explain the excellence of a
particular interpretation? We think so, and to illustrate in what follows.
In this case, S2 – the entire genre tradition of the aria – is folkish, volksthüm-
licher Gesang, and thus is deliberately simple as to its style. Yet, Lorenz adds to
his interpretation an aspect that stems from the Schubertian lied. That is, he inter-
prets the aria according to the German lied tradition, the S2 of lied. This interpreta-
tion ranges far from the stereotyped, Wagnerian, consonance-saturated style, the
Bayreuth “barking”. It is lyrical, soft, song-like, which lets the particular qualit-
ies of Lorenz’s voice resonate. No one since has superseded this interpretation.
His voice also has a feminine aspect, momentarily reminding one of a contralto.
Therefore the profile of Lorenz’s rendition is constituted such that M1 and S1 are
emphasized, while on the level of S2 the lied genre is foregrounded. M1 represents
the brightness of bel canto, but its S1 reference to Italian-ness forgotten, replaced
by the S1 of German lied-aesthetics. What we have is not direct conflict, but rather
bi-isotopies of the Italian and German styles, which are here reconciled.
In subsequent recordings by Lorenz, his voice clearly sounds tired, at a time
when more value was being placed on stage charisma, the performer’s kinesics,
than on voice quality. We have only one film document of Lorenz, namely the
climax of the duet between Brünnhilde and Siegfried at the beginning of “Götter-
dämmerung”; in which movie we also see Winifred Wagner and the stage director
Tietjen listening to the performance. It is very short, lasting only two minutes; but
we can infer from the film that the stage language was very gestural, in conson-
ance with the Bayreuth S2 genre. Spectators-listeners were able to overlook any
roughness in the voice, thanks to the gestural qualities.
Lorenz also sang the role of Walther v. Stolzing. The recording of the Preislied
is surprising, since nowhere on it does his voice reach its full brilliance, but
instead holds tense in the upper register. By contrast, the live recording from
Bayreuth, made during the war under Furtwängler’s direction, also proves to be
an interesting document. In the Preislied the same Stollen is repeated three times.
On the first time Lorenz sings it intentionally slowly, with unbearable pathos. The
second time he performs it faster than normal, as if passing it by. Only on the
third time does he build to a narrative culmination or highlight, the shine of the
Meisterlied. In sum, he applies three different performance strategies.
Kirsten Flagstad
A similar conflict occurs between gestural language, kinesics, and vocal part –
the levels of M1 and M2 of the interpretation – in the gestures by actress Kirsten
Flagstad (1895–1962). In New York, she was filmed after the war when performing
on a Bob Hope Show. Her Nordic physiognomy, her M1, corresponds on all points
to the Germanic world of Die Walküre, that is to say, its narrative levels of M1 and
M2. Vocally the interpretation is brilliant, the words distinct, but not shouted or
overly dramatized. The Valkyrie enjoy their “hojotohoo” as they should. There is
nothing gloomy or heavy about it. Yet in the staging (S2), the waving of the sword
in an awkward manner produces a quite comical effect. That level is in conflict
with M1 and M2. On S1, however, the figure is both vocally and bodily acceptable
as a Wagnerian, super-Valkyre type. The following diagram portrays her profile of
Brünnhilde and the conflicts among its various modes:
M1 M2
S2
Z S1
Figure 11.14: a: Kirsten Flagstad; b: Her profile as interpreter
Ella Eronen
The great diva of Finnish theater was Ella Eronen (1900–1987), who is not well
known outside her own country and culture. She nevertheless made herself into
a true diva rather early in her career. She started in movie roles as a femme fatale
figure on the order of Anna Magnani, but later she was just an aging diva, made
outstanding by her voice. Her greatest success of all time was her recitation of
the Finnish national anthem (by J. L. Runeberg) in Stockholm stadium, where she
performed it following the outbreak of the Winter War in 1939. That performance
proved to have enormous propaganda value on behalf of the Finns.
M1 M2
S2
Z S1
Figure 11.15: a: Ella Eronen; b: Her profile as an actress
The pathetic quality of her voice was her distinctive feature on the M2 level. It was
the dominant trait of her profile, even in Nestroy’s play Titus Feuerfuchs, in which
I saw her in Helsinki in the 1960s. In addition, I saw her personally at a family visit
and was astonished by her transformation from stage to civil life: after a sauna
there remained no trace of the make-up of her M1 and M2. Ella Eronen was an
example of how one’s M2 can become one’s own S2 genre, particularly when she
recited Eino Leino, the Finnish symbolist poet, at the annual celebration of the
Finnish Rosenkreutz movement. Her vocal gesture impressed one by its darkly
vibrating, fateful qualities.
Olavi Reimas
Olavi Reimas (1914–1995) was the main hero of Finnish movies in the 1930s and
1940s, particularly those directed by Valentin Vaala (1909–1976), which ranged
from countryside dramas to salon comedies. In fact, it was Vaala who discovered
Reimas. Vaala, originally a Russian director (Valentin Ivanoff), invented Reimas at
a folk theater in Carelia. Reimas was an ideal hero, since he was a kind of der Man
ohne Eigenschaften of the Finnish cinema, which is to say he had no M2 level of his
own. On the level of M1 he was neutral, positive, plain-faced, outstanding but not
overtly masculine, an actor who completely adapted himself to the interpretation
of the director. He exuded nothing on the level of Moi, not having his M2 in film at
all, and his kinesics, gestures, and voice all submitted to the will of the director.
As a film director, Vaala was not at all a tyrant like Hitchcock, to whom actors
were like cattle; rather, his direction was mild like “a summer rain”, according to
one of his actors (Laine et al. 2004: 136). Vaala recalls his works of that golden age
of the 1940s: “I first determined every movement, every step, every expression of
an actor. I was violent against him/her . . . but now I think . . . that an actor has to
feel himself what he is doing, and not be only a puppet of the director” (ibid.: 135).
He considered movies primarily as an art of directing. During wartime Vaala used
his own team of actors, its central figure being a dark-haired Carelian boy Olavi
Reimas (real name, Unto Kalervo Eskola), who never failed to enchant audiences.
M1 M2
S2
Z S1
Figure 11.16: a: Olavi Reimas; b: His profile as a movie actor
Reimas was wounded in the Winter War, and lay unconscious for a month in hos-
pital; he did recover, but with a partial loss of memory. Yet, Vaala did not abandon
him, although many montages had to be repeated. Reimas was also suited for
salon comedies such as the movie Man Model, in which he is the object of a wo-
man’s erotic glance, anticipating feminist film aesthetics. The woman’s role was
acted by the opera singer Maaria Eira, who from her operatic image had acquired
her own M2. We may contrast Reimas with another film star of the same period,
Tauno Palo, whose career continued much longer. In his roles, Palo exuded his
own strong M1 and M2, and was thus quite the opposite of Reimas, who represen-
ted the gestureless, unexaggerated type of French movie hero that was favored by
Renoir.
Irek Muhamedov
Ballet star of the 1980s, Irek Muhamedov, danced the role of the prince in Nut-
cracker at the Bolshoi and then appeared in London in many roles. An unusually
tall ballet dancer, he projected his own M1 and M2. In our terms, he was an Er-
scheinung for whom it was enough just to appear on stage. In the technical sense
also, his leaps were enormous, and he had the remarkable ability to adapt to
different narrative roles of ballet. (In Minkus’s Bajader, for instance, he portrays a
prince under the influence of opium.) To study such a performance existentially,
without resort to the mere measurements of gestures, presents a challenge of its
own, since every dancer also has his own profile.
Doris Laine-Almi, an authority on ballet, says this about dance:
Because the medium of dance is the human body, it already puts certain limitations on the
movements to be made. On the other hand, man is able to make the same movement in
so many different ways. It can be down slowly or fast, with motion or by staying in place.
Movement that is only effectuated correctly following an order does not look like the same
[. . . ] also the troupe surrounding a dancer changes and causes changes in the interpretation
of a movement.
(Laine-Almi 2000: 72)
In other words, the starting point of a dance is M1, the physical body, but as early
as this level the differences begin. The S1 of a society – for instance different
schools of dance and genres, from classical ballet to Indian temple dances –
exercises its impact on movements on the level of S2. If a dancer creates an
innovation by his person (the level of M2), this can become the source of a genre
on the level of S2. For instance, the character of a faun immediately evokes Serge
Lifar and Debussy’s L’après-midi d’un faune. In the narrative of a ballet the level of
Moi can hide behind the level of Soi and even conflict with it, as in Giselle, where
the prince reveals himself by a gesture indicative of a nobleman (M2/S2).
Although classical ballet uses precisely determined steps and figures, it of-
fers every dancer the possibility to express emotions and narratives in his own
personal manner (Laine-Almi 2000: 73). M2 is revealed even in such an extremely
codified bodily performance. Although dance is the most corporeal of all expres-
sions of M1, it has connections with transcendence and S1 as well. The Persian
M1 M2
S2
Z S1
Figure 11.17: a: Irek Muhamedov; b: His profile as a ballet dancer

Sufi philosopher and mystic Maulana Rumi (1207–1273) wrote his most important
poems and visions while dancing, keeping his hand on a pillar and moving in a
circle; the poems themselves refers to this movement (Hämeen-Anttila 2002: 184).
Hence the enunciation of a performance can be the starting point of a performance
text and narrative, and not vice-versa as is generally the case.
Valery Gergiev
The conductor is a performing artist whose tool is the language of gestures. The
conductor’s gestural signs extend from his personal kinesics, or M1 and M2, to
gestures as a standardized sign language on the level of S2. In addition, such
gestures may attain to the level of S1. A good example is Celibidache, who as a
youth conducted the Berlin Philharmonic in a performance of Beethoven’s Egmont
Overture in Olympia Hall in post-war Berlin. Serving as S1 here is the belief in the
continuity of European culture, and finally its glorification with the final climax of
the music. The performance is immersed in a strong existential situation. In the
case of some conductors the M1 and M2 levels have nothing interesting to offer.
Take Richard Strauss, for instance, who marked the beat with one hand, while at
the same time looking at his watch. In this case, the essential work already has
been done before the performance, allowing one to focus only on the Soi level,
that is to say, the genre of the symphony and its aesthetics (S1).
Figure 11.18: Valery Gergiev
In the case of Valery Gergiev and his “instrument”, the Mariinsky Orchestra, we
find a profile that has undergone a great change over the last 20 years, to judge by
their performances in Mikkeli, Finland every summer during that period. When
the orchestra first arrived they formed a clearly Russian school, with an authorit-
arian conductor that terrified everyone. The orchestra was strongly dominated by
the normative rules of Soi of a certain school. Upon this was built the individual
vision and interpretation of the conductor. Now that the orchestra has come into
contact with the rest of the world, due to the increase in modes of communication,
it has shifted away from the Soi and more to the Moi. The technical brilliance
has of course been maintained, yet now even “mistakes” are permitted, giving
allowance to creativity, and certain nuances have been softened. In short, the
Moi of the musicians has started to become foregrounded, but not to the point of
conflict, because musical interpretation must preserve the technical modality of
‘can’ as stable and reliable on the level of Moi, so that the orchestra may transmit
significations on other levels.
Charles Rosen
It is interesting to follow some musicians in terms of the development of their
careers, and at the same time note their changing profiles. Such is the case with
Charles Rosen (1927–2012), a learned musician who avoids all highlighting of the
Moi level. In his performances, Moi is transparent. The essential thing is always
the narrative of the musical text itself. Still, on the level of Moi one notices an
interesting development in the kinesics of his performance. From the 1960s to the
present, the tempo has accelerated in his performances, though one might have
expected it to slow somewhat with the pianist’s advancing age.
M1 M2
S2
Z S1
Figure 11.19: a: Charles Rosen; b: His profile as a pianist.
In all the cases discussed thus far, it is crucial how the performer situates him-/
herself in terms of the square, that is, in the tensional space of fields Moi and Soi.
What matters is how the performer articulates himself, how he identifies with the
conventional, organic, and existential elements of the narrative. The performer
has the power either to ignore them or to take them into account. To utilize those
elements skilfully, he will choose gestures that portray and manifest them in his
interpretation. For instance, when we analyze an actor’s performance in a film
role, we would ask by what means we may examine the inner dynamics and move-
ment of the “zemic” field between the modes of Moi and Soi. On the other hand,
we have to note how they are all synchronically present but emphasized in dif-
ferent manners. In cinema and theater studies such phenomena have received
little study.
Greta Garbo
For instance, Greta Garbo (1905–1990) in her various roles realizes different con-
flicts of Moi and Soi. In the role of Queen Christina she is a dreamer, almost ab-
sentminded, on the level of M1, which is in contradiction with her S2 role and its
gestures as a Queen. In Grand Hotel she is again the same oneiric heroine, who
says “I want to be alone”. Which contrasts with the activity of hotel guests and
the fast tempo of events.
Figure 11.20: Greta Garbo as Queen Christina
Roland Barthes, in his Mythologies (1957), has a classic essay on the “Face of Greta
Garbo”. If we interpret Barthes’s observations in the light of our “zemic” model
(M1, M2, M3, M4) we get the following results: M1 – “a kind of absolutization
of the flesh, which cannot be reached nor abandoned”, “not so much drawn as
scarped”, “a kind of mask”, “black eyes, the bow of the eyebrows . . . the form of
the nourils”. “There is something considered and human here”. M2 represents a
kind of Platonic ideal; in the film, Garbo is always the same (in Queen Christina).
The nickname “divine” refers less to her superb beauty than to her essence as
a bodily person, who has “descended from heaven”. She did not want her face
ever to decline or to portray any other reality than her intellectual perfection. We
should recall that, after her film career, Garbo withdrew from the public for the
rest of her life; she met with no-one, even though she lived quite a long time. In
terms of S2, her face mirrored her filmic role, her position as a Swedish film star.
Garbo’s face represents that fragile moment in which cinema shifts from existen-
tial beauty to the beauty of the essence, when the archetype becomes a vanishing
figure. Barthes compares Garbo to Audrey Hepburn on this level, to the child-like
or kittenish woman. Garbo’s uniqueness was conceptual, on the order of Hepburn.
Garbo’s face is an idea, Hepburn’s an event. On S1 we have the concept of the face
as an “idea”, as above. It points to an abstract aesthetic value. Referring to Garbo’s
visage, Barthes calls it “. . . the face of snow and loneliness” (Barthes 1957: 95).
Romy Schneider
If we stop the temporal flow of a film we notice that, like the musician, the actor is
subject to time, that his or her gestures move in time. Kari Salosaari (1989, 2000)
construes this motion as the constant transformation of the modalities. We take
actress Romy Schneider as our case-study here.
Figure 11.21: Romy Schneider
Henry Bacon has provided us with observations on the face of Romy Schneider
(1938–1982) in different montages, concentrating on her performances in two
roles. In Visconti’s film Il lavoro, she plays the daughter of a rich German industrial
magnate; the action begins when she discovers the adultery of her husband, an
Italian count. In Ludwig she plays the role of Sissi, Ludwig’s supposed beloved.
Essential, for Bacon, are the alternating expressions of the actress’s face, which
is not a “petrified” one as with Garbo. Schneider’s expressions, says Bacon, form
part of the narrative: “Dialogue is less important than Romy’s acting . . . in a very
short time span her face expresses playfulness, irony, scorn, indignation, hatred,
sorrow, humility . . . ”. All these expressions take place in only half a minute. Bacon
observes the face on the level of M1: lips, eyes, voice – these are the physical
tools with which the director and cameraman create her character and role,
which consists of the alternation of M2 between determination and vulnerability.
Cinema channels Schneider’s bravura; that is to say, it utilizes her position as S2.
At the end of Il lavoro, according to Bacon, there appears an almost “existential
anguish”, when the protagonist fails to create her new identity and withdraws
behind the veil of her social class, into S1.
In her role in Ludwig, the contrast between M1 and S1 is strongly foregroun-
ded. S1 represents the world of real politics and its attached conventions, accord-
ing to which Sissi and Ludwig cannot meet in reality. Yet, even here she masks
the character, as M1 transformed into M2, since as Judith Weston (cited by Bacon)
states: “Character is the one who always wants one thing more than anything else
and is ready to give up all for it”. This is a sound observation. Indeed, character
(role, theme-actor) in music also behaves in this way. It has a strong modality of
will (vouloir); it is marqué, in the foreground, a leading thread, which subsumes
all other discursive elements.
In chamber music and in orchestral works that feature a lot of instruments,
parts and levels, one has to hear the “melody” is, where the main idea goes. In
general, only one actor can be so existentially marked. It is the performer’s task
to find it, to pick it out from the plurality of the narration.
Elvis Presley
We want to include in our paradigm of artists also one from popular music, the
semiotically very challenging figure of Elvis Presley. It is obvious that the literature
around this phenomenon, in the sociological sense, as a special conflict between
emerging American and global youth culture (see Marcel Danesi’s studies) and
the ‘establishment’, the genuinely Adornian struggle, is manifest here. Yet, also
his development and decline from a youth idol to a tragic, aged, grotesque figure
continuing by force his career, a true ‘rake’s progress’, is to be noted. The fascin-
ating aspect here is, particularly in the best moments of the early Elvis Presley,
the quality of his voice, a pure ‘genosign’ in the sense of Roland Barthes. In the
love songs like Love Me Tender and Can’t Help Falling In Love his voice still has
that recognizable quasi-androgynic vibration at the end of long notes, as a lyrical
expansion. In terms of bel canto this is perhaps the so-called ‘head voice’ with
its resonance in the whole body. So, the strong emphasis on M1 in his profile is
evident in those lyrical moments, but the same underlining can also appear as
‘animal’ aggressive use of his whole body on stage, hands and limbs particularly.
Figure 11.22: a: The young Elvis Presley; b: The zemic profile of Elvis Presley
This was a revolt against other type of traditional American country song of the
type of Pete Seeger, for instance. It became M2, his personal style, and then the
distinguishing mark of his role as a rock n’ roll star, i.e., S2. All this lead to a
particular value profile in S1, which was strongly opposed to the bourgeois and
conventional American social personality.
Chapter 12
On culinemes, gastrophemes, and other signs
of cooking
12.1 Introduction
Nearly all the great semioticians have discussed food and cooking – indeed, they
could scarcely have overlooked such a fascinating and central human activity.
Using a phonetic model, Claude Lévi-Strauss elaborated his famous culinary tri-
angle of raw/cooked/rotten (and Umberto Eco has punningly bemoaned the fact
that, due to his gourmandise, he can no longer squeeze himself into Levi Strauss
jeans). Roland Barthes examined the syntagms and paradigms of the menu as
a manifestation of modern French mythology, and A. J. Greimas investigated the
recipe for la soupe au pistou as a “narrative program” (1979). Even in the cultural
semiotics of Lotman food makes an appearance, when the author examines an-
cient Slavic texts and considers what pie decorations have to say about an entire
culture. It thus appears that food and gastronomy are eminently open to semiotic
study. But if semiotics is communication plus signification, then how does food
communicate and function as a sign?
The answer is not so simple. For first of all, gastronomy examines only one
species of food, namely, the kind of excellent cuisine that pleases gourmets.
Brillat-Savarin, author of Physiologie du goût (1826), succeeded in defining that
special human agent – the gourmet – who alone can receive the message of
good food. In other respects, too, Brillat-Savarin’s classical text emphasizes
the receiver’s part in the communication of food. Altogether, gourmandise –
a term which Brillat-Savarin suggests should not be translated but left in the
French – appears as a marked phenomenon in the linguistic sense. As a kind of
foregrounded type, it stands out from most of humanity, which eats only to live
and not to enjoy.
Does, then, food as a sign exist only for the receiver? If so, then food as com-
munication would clearly represent a message directed towards that recipient,
though not in Jakobson’s conative sense. In the latter case, one would attempt
to use food to influence the conduct of the receiver. Yet some would say that the
opposite takes place: the reception of the food sign is completed in the act of the
food being enjoyed. Thus, in this scenario, food communication would be focused
on the receiver and at the same time be non-conative.
The role of the sender – the cook – crystallizes in the recipe, the verbal rules
for food preparation. Recipes vary in character and length. Often they present in
250 | 12 On culinemes, gastrophemes, and other signs of cooking
an extremely condensed form the paradigmatic elements (ingredients), and then

as laconically prescribe that the food preparation take place in a certain temporal
order. Televised cooking programs little alter this procedure, though all the phases
of cooking may be shown visually, step by step. In the end, it seems as if food as a
sign could be summarized into a series of commands for action, a procedure which
nearest illustrates the operational definition in logic: the definition of a cake is its
recipe.
Yet it would seem rather strange and contrary to most semiotic practices if
food as a sign could be reduced to this mode of existence. Naturally, the exper-
ienced gastronome can from the mere recipe quite easily imagine how the food
would look and taste if prepared according to the directions. He can mentally
reconstruct the food object without actually producing it. Conversely, working
from a prepared dish or from a picture of it, he can analyze and reconstruct the
recipe without ever touching the food.
This process is amazingly analogous to that of musical communication. The
musical specialist can, by merely leafing through the score, conceptualize how
the piece would sound when played. Composition contests are based on this kind
of judgement. Confronted with new pieces that have not yet been performed, the
judge must evaluate them by sight, or by the “inner ear”. Correspondingly, when
a specialist has heard a piece, he can sometimes at least partly reconstruct its
score. As the extreme case there was Mozart, who could notate an entire piece of
music after hearing it only once. These two cases, however, illustrate the outer
limits of musical communication. Generally, it is hard to imagine music without
its physical support, the musical sign, the sounding form.
But what remains between the recipe and the experience of enjoyment? There
is of course the food itself as object, as a ready-made physical product. But this
object cannot fully function as a sign until it is tasted, sipped, eaten – in a word,
enjoyed. As the consequence of this experience, however, the corporeal food-sign
vanishes; the physical basis of the communication act is annihilated. What re-
mains is only a memory image of the sign – which can be quite powerful and
generate, as in the case of Proust, a whole series of the most poetic associations.
For one who travels a lot, a gastro-cognitive map of the world gradually takes
shape alongside that of geography. Countries and towns find their positions on
the map according to what kind of food has been enjoyed in each place. In this
extreme form, dishes can also serve as signs for people – as their “doubles”, as
Proust used to say. For once we have tasted the bravura of someone’s culinary
skills, this becomes his or her “sign”, and it is inevitably evoked even when we
enjoy that food or dish elsewhere or even only when we think of it.
The undeniable, sad truth is that the semiotic sign of food is at its inception
doomed to destruction, and that this species of signs does not have the same
12.2 Two historical perspectives | 251
stability as, say, those of painting, literature, or architecture. Gastronomy should

thus be equated with the performing arts of music, theatre, dance, and the like,
whose signs are always bound with time that is understood not only as fleeting
and fragile moments but as the very physical basis on which they subsist. All the
performing arts also have the same essential problem; namely, they can either
succeed or fail. The notation of sign production does not guarantee success, which
depends instead on the whole situation of communication in which the sign is
produced, transmitted and received. As is the case with all performing arts, in food
preparation, too, the slightest disturbance can prevent the product from function-
ing as a sign.
For Greimas, food had the semiotic status of a “value object”, that is to say,
an object in which values have been invested. In the construction of such objects,
the essential point for Greimas is the achievement of values, their discovery and
manipulation: “The objects themselves are of no interest. They are worth con-
structing, creating, producing only to the extent that they form the place for the
manifestation of values” [Les objets ne l’intéressent – et leur construction ne mérite
d’être entreprise – que dans la mesure où ils constituent des lieux d’investissement
des valeurs]. (Greimas 1979: 157.)
This same view applies also to music, in the idea that the music is not the
same as the tones, but only manifests itself by means of them. But can we adopt
such a radically “spiritual” view here? For what could food be as mere value,
without the material object carrying it? Everything spiritual which is connected
to food seems to be an a posteriori phenomenon. It seems difficult to isolate the
food sign with any kind of phenomenological reduction, since it is always bound
to its context, its multiple connections in the chain of communication and process
of signification.
It is generally thought that those interested in food are incurable hedonists,
and that those who care about table and other manners are stiff formalists. And a
philosopher might at this stage make recourse to Kant’s Metaphysics of Manners,
only to be surprised that the latter’s categorical imperative – “Do to others what
you wish them to do to you” – crops up in one of the central passages in Brillat-
Savarin’s Physiologie du goût!
12.2 Two historical perspectives
It will be instructive to compare the views of two world-famous French gourmets

and chefs, Brillat-Savarin and Édouard Nignon. The first of these was a well-
known doctor whose starting point in his previously cited book on taste was the
“medical” observation of food and eating. The charm of the book comes from the
fact that it reads as if it were objectively precise description, while it is in fact

highly subjective and evaluative. Running completely contrary to Greimas’s view,
Brillat-Savarin takes the position that values, all spiritual things, all of culture and
society stem from human physiological necessity, from the need to satisfy and
sustain the senses. Such satisfaction ennobles one, making one happy, tolerant
and benevolent toward others. Ultimately, all of society depends on gourmandise.
In the chapter entitled “The Advantages of Gourmandise”, Brillat-Savarin states
the following: “[Gourmandise] is the impulse which moves living foods from one
country to the other; it is a judge which determines the prices of food; it is the
hope which arouses competition; it is a profession which creates life and causes
the perpetual circulation of monetary resources” (Brillat-Savarin 1826/1988: 135).
On this view, one could say that Lévi-Strauss’s theory of three levels of society –
the exchange of messages, things, and women – rests upon a fourth, deeper level.
And that level is the exchange of foods.
All great historical events, even conspiracies and political coups, have been
decided upon, prepared, and carried out during feasts (op. cit.: 57). Brillat-Savarin
views all the arts and all spiritual things as being based on sensations; they are
continuations and refinements of the senses: “The visual sense created painting,
sculpture and dramatic arts; the auditory sense, music; the olfactory sense, the
use and cultivation of perfumes; the taste sense, the production of alimentary
goods, their selection and elaboration; the tactile sense was included in all the
arts; and the physical sense of love yielded coquetries and other phenomena.”
When we turn to another scion of French gastronomy, Édouard Nignon, the
viewpoint changes. In his book, Éloges de la cuisine française, he contrarily states
that food reflects higher, non-sensual values. Nignon (1865–1934) was one of the
illustrious chefs at the imperial court of Russia. At the parties of the millionaire
Ivan Morozoff he concocted spectacular meals such as an aquarium of Chinese
fish that sprayed champagne, and a bear sculpted from ice that proffered caviar
at the same time as a lamp in the animal’s stomach made its eyes twinkle. Around
1915 Nignon moved from the court of Czar Nikolai to the Hotel Metropol in Moscow,
where he prepared fantastic meals for diners in the famous hall with a fountain in
the center. Eventually, though, Nignon was forced to return to Paris, when during
the Bolshevik Revolution his cooks went on strike. There he became the propri-
etor of the Restaurant Larue and at last realized his dream of operating his own
establishment. His clientele consisted of the leading artists of France, from Marcel
Proust to Alfred Capus and Anatole France. Nignon had a sublime conception of
the art of cooking, as the opening of his book illustrates:
“What is art, in general, but the lively, harmonious, subtle expression of all that the human
brain can conceive about the great, the beautiful and sublime? Every work of art is determ-
ined by the intellectual and moral environment of which it is the offspring. The products of
the Culinary Art are not an exception to this rule . . . .”
(Nignon 1995: 21)
Nignon goes on to note that culinary art does not depend on the external bril-
liance of its products. The same artistic mastery can show forth in a simple pot de
feu soup just as it does in Imperial chicken, the Queen’s smoked salmon, or the
Royal Deer Steak, since everything depends on the savoir-faire of the performer.
The mind of a great cook unites great knowledge, long practice, and a poet’s soul
that is sensitive to all nuances of the Good and the Beautiful. The art of cooking
presupposes strict obedience to the rules, but not as blind dogmatism. Nignon en-
capsulates his doctrine in the slogan, Routine est crime en cuisine. He encourages
younger cooks to seek Beauty and Truth (Nignon op. cit.: 23), and exclaims:
“Carry and develop in yourselves the profound love for the Culinary Art, generator of Force
and Life. May your creations be healthy and may they reveal extreme care in the slightest
details. Do not walk mechanically on paths already trod. Study, meditate, search always, be
creators!” (p. 45) “One is born a poet or musician; one can also be born a cook.” (p. 43)
The great teacher of Nignon was Carême. And Nignon also mentions Brillat-
Savarin, when admitting that the invention of a new dish can be compared to
the discovery of a new star. Still, Nignon’s basic attitude toward cooking artistry
clearly differs from that of Brillat-Savarin.
12.3 Semiotic questions about food
Let us leave our two famous chefs, and return to some basic questions in the
semiotics of gastronomy: what is a gastronomic sign? How does food function as
a sign? The problem can be approached from two directions. One may engage the
food sign, or rather the entire gustatory “text”, by taking into account its overall
functioning and context and every aspect of the food experience. Or one may
scrutinize the smallest significant units of food, as in linguistics we speak about
phonemes and morphemes, semes and phemes. Taking the latter approach one
might call the minimal unit of food a gastreme. Or if we conceive of every sign
as divided into signifiers and signified, then we might speak about gastrophemes
and gastrosemes. The gastropheme would refer to the physical qualities, and gast-
roseme to the meaning of the food. Such a distinction immediately poses ques-
tions. Can, for instance, the taste sensation be a gastropheme and a taste exper-
ience a gastroseme? Or are the ingredients of a recipe gastrophemes, which in

various combinations would produce gastrosemes?
To begin answering these questions, we can turn to a history of gastronomy
by the Finnish scholar Jussi Talvi. He speaks about the first “taste experience” of
mankind as taking place in 1765, when a Monsieur Boulanger invented a strong
bouillon for the poor people of Paris (see Talvi 1989: 213). From this event comes
the word restaurant, which literally means both a food that revitalizes and re-
stores, and the place where it can be enjoyed. Talvi says: “Such a soup may have
provided the first deliberate taste experiences of man.” Should then the gastreme
be defined as a deliberate, intentional taste experience? Following from this, it
would appear that gastropheme/seme come nearest to the signs of poetry and
not to those of everyday communication. And yet, since the terms “seme” and
“pheme” imply a certain generality, we should perhaps reserve the terms “gast-
ropheme/seme” for referring to the “poetic” function of the cooking art, and use
terms such as “culineme” (or “culinopheme/culinoseme”) to describe generalized
cooking in all its forms.
Lévi-Strauss elaborated his famous theory of culinary triangles, raw/cooked/
rotten, which serve as three distinctive features in the world’s cooking systems.
For instance, in the Finnish dairy-products culture, milk = raw, cheese = cooked,
and rotten = soured milk, yogurt, and the like. In the category of “cooked”, Lévi-
Strauss distinguishes several modes of production which provide foods with their
particular meanings. In this way one might try to analyze the gastrophemes/semes
that do not depend on subjective experience, and on this basis determine the
distinctive features of various food cultures. To food we could easily apply the
commutation test proposed by Roland Barthes: one switches the places of the
supposed gastrophemes (for instance, two materials) and then observes whether
this change produces a difference on the level of gastrosemes, or taste experience
(just as in French we can change the consonants /p/ and /b/ and get two different
words pas and bas). Omit the apricot jam from a Sacher torte, or replace it with
orange jam, and the item is no longer a Sacher torte.
When we move from reflections on the smallest units of meaning to food in
its global signification, we find that the latter meaning comes not so much from
the food itself as from the broader context(s) in which it appears. Food is a part of
man’s life-world, or Umwelt, his/her whole life praxis, which provides food and
the enjoyment of it with significations. This is particularly true in societies which
still live either entirely or partly in a so-called ethnosemiotic state, which is char-
acterised by a certain cyclicity, the adaptation of life to the alternation of seasons,
religious occasions, feasts, and so on. In such a state, the meaning of food is not
so much determined by its inner qualities, gastrophemes and semes, but by what
Greimas called isotopies and what Lotman termed semiospheres. These terms refer
to the semiotic continuum that enables the life of its constituent, individual signs.
The existence of this continuum is clearly proved by the so-called traditional food
cultures, which the gastronomes do not often appreciate:
The history of gastronomy without exception shows that the so-called average person has
created none of those delicious foods which we can enjoy even today. People have created
traditional foods, but a major part of them are, however, the foods of times of starvation . . .
they cannot be polished to become something more refined.
(Talvi 1989: 201)
Yet there are numerous descriptions of gastronomically delicious foods, created

“anonymously”, which reflect the entire living world. In Gogol’s short story, The
Old-World Landowners, Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulcheria Ivanovna spend quiet
lives in their village house which is bubbling over with abundance. Although the
servants steal as much as they can, nothing is missing from the table of Afanasy
and Pulcheria. In fact, the two protagonists do hardly anything, and their repeated
dialogues go something like this: How is it, Pulcheria Ivanovna, should we not
taste something? What would you like to eat now, Afanasy Ivanovich? Perhaps
pies with fat or puppet pies or perhaps salted mushrooms? Strangely, in the de-
scription of their food habits the order of the dishes seems not to follow any pre-
established narrative program, which in this case would be a menu. As Roland
Barthes has shown, the menu has its paradigm, the store of possible dishes, and
its syntagm, the linear course of their enjoyment. Yet it seems that in Gogol’s story
there is only one paradigm for Afanasy and Pulcheria: the inexhaustible food store
from which they impulsively choose things. This reflects an ethnosemiotically ar-
ticulated culture, in which food symbolizes a certain stable, static, sleepy, but at
the same time undeniably poetic life style. The narrator describes such an isotopy,
or semiosphere, of food in the following way:
. . . always when my wagons approach the verandah of such a house, my heart is taken by a
wonderfully sweet and quiet state . . . the faces of those old people always have such mild-
ness, they reflect such hospitality and pure mindedness, that one deliberately abandons,
even if for only a while, all unscrupulous wishes and unnoticeably shifts to their silent,
close-to-nature life . . .
Gogol’s novel also describes the abrupt mutation of a society from an ethnose-
miotic to a sociosemiotic state in which organic solidarity no longer prevails, but
everything becomes mechanized and isolated. Most modern cookbooks, which
only give prescriptive advice for preparation without reporting on the origin of
the dish, present food as detached, as its own more or less artificial product. Such
food can be offered to anyone, and enjoyed anywhere and at any time.
When a recipe book does describe the origin of the food and its context of
usage, it better attains to the original ethnosemiotic state. Some cookbooks almost
presuppose that the reader’s competence is sufficient to cover the life style which
is reflected in the dishes. For instance, Mary Emma Showalter’s Mennonite Com-
munity Cookbook (1986) is such a book. Although the recipes in it are very scanty,
they are fascinating because by following them the reader imagines himself as
reconstructing part of an almost extinct life-style – the world which the movie
Witness showed to millions of spectators around the world. One encounters here
the art of cooking as an oral culture, which the author attempts to reach by literal
means:
Since a cookbook of the favorite recipes of Mennonite families had never been published,
I now began to sense that the handwritten recipe books were responsible. I asked wherever
I went and was astonished to learn how many of them had been destroyed in recent years.
The daughters of today were guilty of pushing them aside in favor of the new, just as I had
done one day. It is true that many of our mothers were still using the old favorite recipes,
but were doing so by memory. When I found them, the little notebooks were usually at the
bottom of a stack of modern cookbooks and were kept only for memory’s sake. Through the
years many had become so worn and soiled that in places they were no longer legible.
(Showalter 1986: ix)
To the same category belongs the cookbook by Princess Olga Obolensky, pub-
lished under the title Herkkuja ruhtinattaren keittiöstä (Delicacies from the Kitchen
of a Princess). The recipes are quite ascetic, and at the end of the book there are fac-
simile printings from the Finnish-language version (from the first edition in 1931).
Still, the recipes are made appealing by the fact that they reflect a certain life-style
at the manor of Rantalinna, near Imatra. By preparing, for instance, “The old cake
from Riga” according to the book, we can imagine ourselves to participate in that
earlier way of living.
12.4 Cooking as a generative course
Thus far, I have approached my object from two angles: from its smallest units of
signification and from its broader social contexts. Can these two approaches be
brought together so as to elaborate a unified methodology for examining food?
This poses quite a challenge to semiotics, but it is surely possible to do.
Cooking can easily be paralleled to a generative course. In the same way as
generative grammar presents the rules for the production of language, we could
consider a recipe as a collection of rules for “producing” or “generating” food.
Yet there are many kinds of generative grammars. A. J. Greimas, among others,
has applied his own theories to a recipe from Provence for la soupe au pistou.
The preparation of food is made explicit with a particular “narrative program” in
which the sender-cook attempts to conjoin his receiver-guest to the value object,
la soupe au pistou.
In my own work, I have applied Greimas’s theories in a somewhat different
way, especially to music (and as was stated above, noteworthy similarities exist
between the generation of music and food). In doing so, I have distinguished four
levels which from the isotopies, go to the spatial, temporal and actorial categories,
and further to the modalities, ultimately reaching the surface level of phemes and
semes (see Figure 12.1).
The isotopes of food have already been discussed above. They indicate that
whole world of Dasein with all its significations, which forms the background
and starting-point of culinary activity and which determines its raison d’être. The
isotopy of food can be ceremonial, for instance, as in the category of a “formal
dinner”, to use Emily Post’s vocabulary (such a meal is often illustrated by dinner
scenes in English upper-class castles in the novels of Wodehouse and in their film
realizations or in my own novel Retour à la Villa Nevski, 2014). Or the food isotopy
can be ritual, such as the Eucharist in Wagner’s Parsifal. It can be biological-
medical, as occurs when one dines in a restaurant containing live food (housed
by aquariums, cages, and the like). It can be social, as dinner is envisioned in
Minnen från mitt liv, hemma och ut (1931), the memoirs of the Finnish sculptor and
gourmet, Ville Vallgren (whom we shall return to later). The food isotopy can be
economic: a business lunch during negotiations; it can be political: say, in the
encounter of two heads of different states (for instance, the rector of Paris Univer-
sity V, Pierre Villard, has investigated the history of a dinner set that was used only
at royal meals). The isotopy can be erotic: Dejeuner sur l’herbe in Manet’s painting
or in Renoir’s film. There can be an endless amount of isotopies, any of which
can constitute the starting-point for all cooking and culinarism. They provide the
whole semiosis of food with sense.
On the next level, food is approached via three categories: spatial, temporal,
and actorial. Some basic questions regarding spatiality are these: Where is the
food eaten? How is the food related to a certain place? If such a thing as a “spirit
of place” exists, how does it appear as a food sign? True gastrosemioticians are
recognized by the fact that they do not remember places by their names, events,
atmospheres, or smells, but by what they eat and where they eat it.
Conversely, certain foods perform their gastronomic markedness function
only if they are enjoyed in a certain place. Due to a kind of intertextual infiltration,
the “semes” of a location penetrate, so to say, to the place of the gastrosemes; they
connect on the level of experience to the network of semes which in our minds
characterise that place. An entirely different type of map emerges on the basis of
Figure 12.1: Generation of food
these gastrosemes, which experience scatters in often unexpected places. A guest

may arrive in New York for the first time in the morning and, after the long flight,
stagger to a coffee shop. With his coffee, he is probably offered pancakes, whipped
butter, and bacon. In such a way the new arrival is initiated into American-ness
via a taste experience that unites the sweet and the salty – two rather opposed
phemes – in the same meal. Or when the gastrotourist arrives at Rio de Janeiro
or São Paulo, the thick juices of caju, goiaba, abacaxi and the like may give him
his first conception of the tropics, which he perhaps glimpsed from the window
of the airplane. In Mexico one is invited to taste a certain black mushroom which
belonged to the diet of the Aztecs, thus at once being transported to a distant
culture. When one has seen Pablo Neruda’s house at Isla Negra in the Pacific,
one may drive to San Antonio to taste the soup made of fish with unbelievably
coloured shells, which experience is mixed in the mind with the sea-evoking
poetry of Neruda and the contours of the Andes. And many a semiotician has
paid a visit to the Tudor Room on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University,
or has taken morning coffee at the Up-Town Café with Thomas A. Sebeok. The list
could be continued endlessly.
Cooking, as any performing art, is also a temporal activity. Precise timing on
the microlevel is one of the most essential aspects of the “generation” of a meal.
The principle of the quandité of time, as one French philosopher calls it, is most
important in gastrosemiosis. Some dishes require several days’ or even weeks’
patience; in others a delay of one minute can be fateful. For instance, Nordic rye
bread cannot be prepared hastily; and if French chocolate cake remains in the
oven one minute too long, it is no longer French chocolate cake. Some dishes are
connected with cyclic periodisation, or what could be called the ethnosemiotic
calendar. (Finnish life, for one, still strongly follows such seasons and their par-
ticular foods.)
As to the last Greimassian category, that of actoriality, it is quite apparent that
cooking cannot take place without actors. For who else has the competence or
savoir-faire to prepare food, judge it, and “perform” it? Édouard Nignon defines
such competence and performance in his Éloges (cited above) and sees it as based
on three principles: experience, theory, and reasoning (1995: 43). Marcel Proust
invented the notion of a “Sonate pathétique of cooking”. To him cooking, musical
performance, and receiving guests were cases of the same category, whose perfec-
tion in each case was a certain simplicity, moderation, and charm (Proust in his
preface to John Ruskin’s essay, “Of Kings’ Treasures”).
The three categories of place, time, and actors together constitute the situ-
ation in which the semiosis of food is realized. In addition to these basic prin-
ciples, all the other species of signs – icons, indices, and symbols – obtain in the
semiosis of food.
The next level of generation concerns the modalities of cooking. Modalities
are the ways by which participants in communication colour and “humanize”
their messages and sign objects. Modalities are thus the most dynamic part of the
semiotic process and hence the most difficult to fix as categories and concepts.
The one who prepares the food and the one who enjoys it both “modalize” the
food. In addition, some modalities are already included in the food object itself.
For one, the modality of “knowing” already appears in the requirement that food
satisfy our curiosity, in the sense that it must be a new taste experience. We do not
willingly serve the same food to our guests on two consecutive occasions, just as
at a concert of new music one normally does not perform a previously heard piece
(unless it is a masterwork which the audience insists on hearing).
Then there is the modality of “will”, in Schopenhauer’s sense. Culinary activ-
ity is based upon the Wille zum Essen, a kind of meta-will. Though the cultural
differences are great in this area, the ingestion of every meal follows an energetic
process which makes one eat its various segments in the “right” order, such as
the alternation of sweet and salty dishes (in Italy, for instance, the ice creams and
sorbets as mid-deserts may cool the overheated modality of will before the next
meat dish arrives).
The modality of capability, or “can”, appears in the technical realization of
the food, its virtuosity and performance. As Ruskin said: only the one who has
measured the resistance of the material can judge the modality of “power” (can).
We come next to the modality of “must”, which in this case refers to all the
norms that govern culinary communication. These norms can stem from many
different isotopies (nutritional, medical, social, and so on), but they can also ori-
ginate from the next level of generation. Finally, the modality of “belief” refers to
food as the manifestation of a certain symbolic value, food as conveying a certain
persuasiveness. When all the other modalities are in harmony with time, location,
and actor, we experience the food to be in its proper “place”, thereby manifesting
the category of truth. But of course it is also possible to cheat or to “lie” with food
by substituting the wrong ingredients, altering a recipe, serving a dish in improper
order, and so on.
As the last level of generation we have the phemes and semes of the food, its
smallest units, already pondered above. This level concerns the food as “such”,
that is, as combinations of phemes and semes.
The generative model just sketched proposes various rules and levels of
cooking. The model is Greimas-inspired, but it does not seek to produce a strictly
formal analyses on the order of his own study of a Provençale recipe. Rather,
my theory can be taken as a mnemonic and heuristic model of gastrosemiotic
analysis. It fixes our attention on all essential aspects of food, and also helps us
to judge whether a menu or recipe is lacking some crucial aspect of meaning.
My model is not generative in the prescriptive sense, such that by it one could
produce, say, skilful, authentic, convincing, surprising, or even “correct” dishes.
Rather, it is descriptive, insofar as with its help one can model any processes
related to cooking and elucidate them with a particular metalanguage that has
12.5 An application: cooking in Paris according to Ville Vallgren | 261
already proved itself in connection with other verbal and non-verbal sign systems.
In this way, cooking is elevated from its often underestimated status as one of the
“lesser arts” among human texts and sign activities. Furthermore, my model is
evaluative, since it tries to analyze the goodness or badness of the product, and
to answer why certain combinations of gastrophemes and semes are successful
and others are not.
12.5 An application: cooking in Paris according to

Ville Vallgren, Finnish sculptor and gourmet
Here I shall test the applicability of my theory by analyzing one well-known cook-
book, written by the Finnish sculptor and gourmet Ville Vallgren, entitled The
Food Catechesis of Old Man Ville. Vallgren’s descriptions of food are rare in the
literature, in the sense that he moves on all levels of generation. The bohemian
life of Paris forms the background for his recipes, a life in which he participated
from 1877–1921. He lived in artistic neighborhoods in Montmartre with such well-
known Finnish and Swedish artists as Gunnar Berndtson, Stigell, Aukusti Uotila,
Otto Wallenius, Carl Larsson, Ernst Josephson and Axel Munthe. They often held
merry afternoon feasts to celebrate expositions in their favourite restaurants Je-
sus Syrak, Clarisse of Café Neapolitaine. In the mornings Vallgren would often
be awakened by his roommate, Pelle Ekström, who had already bought brioches
and prepared coffee. Ekström would ask the rising Vallgren, “Behagar Ers Höghet
morgonkaffe?” (Would your Excellency like to take morning coffee?)
In his memoirs and in passing comments in his food catechesis, Vallgren
writes about his Parisian friends; for instance, how Émile Zola disapproved of
the way the Russians were treating the Finns (at that time Finland was still an
autonomous part of Russia). Vallgren notes ironically that the real reason for
Zola’s indignation was that he received no royalties from any of his novels that
were printed in Russia. Paul Verlaine was once saved by Vallgren when he left the
Café Procope drunk, since he never enjoyed other than a ham sandwich and a
beer. After Verlaine had recited the poem Il pleure dans mon cœur, Vallgren took
him home to Rue Monsieur le Prince, and soon thereafter Verlaine died. In sum,
Vallgren’s circle of acquaintances consisted of all kinds, from creative originals
to shiftless idlers. (When reading his stories one notices how little things have
changed. For his Paris is not so far from that of the contemporary Finnish movie
producers, the Kaurismäki brothers.)
I shall now analyze in more detail one day and its meals from a week in Paris,
as described at the beginning of Vallgren’s food catechesis. The week was sup-
posed to serve as a model of how meals could be planned with reason and altern-
ation, although at the end Vallgren came to the following conclusion (Vallgren
1994: 53):
Now we have eaten one whole week and lived, feasting heartily, well, and expensively. We
cannot continue this way any longer, although it is good to do so sometimes; but if we should
go on living in this reckless way, the bark of our stomach would soon capsize on the waves
of our life. So, we must be moderate and save our health capital and not spend it all, along
with any interest . . . a good, simple food and drink (wine, of course) will guide us in our
daily work to happy days at the age of 100 years.
Figure 12.2: Ville Vallgren in Paris
The spatial, temporal, and actorial situations appear quite clearly in Vallgren’s
text: the place is Paris; the time, one week from May 31, 1920; and the actors are
Ville and his artist colleagues. The “we” form of the story refers not only to this
community but also to the readership, in which Vallgren includes his “us”. The
chapter is entitled “The cooking worries of Wednesday”. The narrator notes that,
having eaten too heavily on Tuesday, today he might eat somewhat lighter. So he
decides to prepare scrambled eggs and adds the following remark – which recurs
12.5 An application: cooking in Paris according to Ville Vallgren | 263
throughout the book: “Everyone knows how good scrambled eggs are prepared in
Paris.” The narrator thus refers to an oral tradition that certainly exists, but which
cannot be defined explicitly.
The eggs require white wine (a Bordeaux Graves) rather than red, says Vall-
gren, who always chooses the drinks. He has a clear conception of the compat-
ibilities and incompatibilities of certain gastrophemes and -semes. “[W]e can eat
kidneys or calf liver. I would rather eat kidneys”, says Vallgren. The recipe for
kidneys follows: butter is browned in a pan into which the kidneys are placed
after they have been doused with hot water and vinaigrette. Then come chopped
mushrooms and onions, and finally red wine or Madeira. (Vallgren often uses wine
in food, which Carême, according to Nignon, completely rejected.) Then Vallgren
announces: “Now it is ready. With it you can eat cooked potatoes or stewed beans
or carrots”. Vallgren’s text is very “deictic”, in the sense that his cooking always
takes place at certain places and times to which the reader is pointed. If we wish
to have rice, Vallgren advises that “we stir well two cups of rice in cold water
and with them pieces of ham and small round spring onions”. In three hours the
food is ready to be enjoyed with either red or white Bordeaux. Then follows good
Roquefort cheese, “since it fits well after the mild rice”. This method of putting
dishes in series could be called the “inner indexicality” of the meal. One dish, so
to say, “invites” the next by a forward-proceeding, indexical reference. It is also
essential that the dishes are not blended, but are eaten one after the other, in the
syntagmatic order. Finally, one takes “big beautiful cultivated strawberries with
sugar, together with a creamy and healthy fresh cheese called petit suisse. Add
some swigs of Château d’Yquem and we are satisfied”, Vallgren announces.
One notes that in Vallgren’s text every food sign is sanctioned according to de-
scriptions of the euphoric or dysphoric modalisation of the receiver. Moreover, all
the described recipes are extremely easy to prepare, thus requiring or exhibiting
a very small degree of the modality of “can”.
As the text continues the depiction of food ceases, and Vallgren declares that
he will leave by car for a dinner tour in the countryside, to the “charming Meudon,
which is on the shore of the Seine”. When the company arrives at a famous restaur-
ant, the Pêche miraculeuse, they immediately order eel ragout, since the expert
knows that that dish takes a long time to prepare. From the verandah, the group
can see the River Seine, its “water calm in the evening sunshine”. This makes
Ville remember a meal he had in the same place on May 17, when the national
day of Norway was celebrated. He similarly recalls vernissage dinners of the nine-
teenth century, with many celebrities, ranging from Edelfelt to Strindberg, sitting
at a table placed on the green meadow, and their “speeches and song as one big
choir”. In his memoirs Vallgren tells how “all” Paris was astonished when they
sang the “Suomis sång” (a well-known choral tune written by Friedrich Pacius) in
the restaurant Clarisse:
När Suomis sång gick av stapeln, blev det stort jubel, succen var storartad, vi måste sjunga den
fyra gånger. Alla voro förvånade och undrade huru vi hade kunnat åstadkomma någonting så
vackert.
[When the song of Finland was sounding, jubilation broke out; so well was it received that
we had to sing it four times. Everyone was amazed and wondered how we had been able to
produce something so beautiful.]
The essential thing to note here is that food and eating are not detached phenom-
ena. Rather, they call forth other artistic performances and associations.
Then the dinner is described in detail, beginning with the main course of fish,
which is followed by grilled chicken. The burgundy wine taken with the dishes
puts the company in a rollicking mood and loosens their tongues to the point of
speechmaking. Vallgren quotes his own ode to Paris and the River Seine, in which
he describes the latter as wriggling like an eel – an iconic sign that connects the
food and its environment: “It offers its poetry as a balm to the man who under-
stands the Parisian atmosphere of life, where nature, food and wine, this Trinity
provides man with a sentimental but passing moment. Amen”. Now they take
asparagus and drink champagne, dropping sweet strawberries in their glasses.
Finally come the cheese and fruits, and thereafter coffee with cognac. “Then we
drive by car through the forest of Boulogne, each to his home”.
Only now does Ville tell us about the preparation of the eel ragout, which in
his excitement he almost forgot to do. This means that our gastrosemiotician is
not always thinking about cooking, but that he wants to enjoy it immediately. The
eel is described as one “actor” of the story:
The eel, this ugly snake fish, is of course peeled, but it is still alive; it is chopped into pieces,
but the damned thing still lives. Ach! How cruel! Now it is put in the pan but it still lives.
Only when we stuff its stomach with the pieces of calf kidneys and calf liver does it become
frightened and die.
It is noteworthy that the ingredients appear in this narration as anthropomorph-

ized actors. They are not mere semiotic objects, but characterized as having the
same modal properties as the sending and receiving actors. The food lives in union
with its isotopy. Nothing is formalistic or mechanical, neither the description of
procedures nor that of the meal, which has not been reified into a rote recipe.
12.6 Conclusion
The theories of Barthes and Greimas have led me to the narrative of Vallgren.
In his story the generation of food does not take place straightforwardly but via
many twists and turns. Undeniably, the main protagonist of the Wednesday story
becomes the eel. And the story itself wriggles, iconically following the lead of this
archi-actor. Vallgren transmits his enthusiasm to the reader, and the meal inspires
its receivers to other action as well. At the feast the food is omnipresent, but at the
same time it provides a marvellous, material isotopy to something quite spiritual,
an artistic celebration of Paris in the spring. In this model tout se tient, everything
depends on everything. The story and the model show how food belongs to the
intertextual network, in which it can, in the words of Lévi-Strauss, function as a
sign of something quite different.
|
Part IV: Heimat
Chapter 13.A
Metaphors of nature and organicism
13.A.1 Introduction
Many signs are in the air that new philosophical foundations and frameworks are
nowadays searched for the studies of signs. One of the characteristic features of
the European semiotics has been to show that the so-called ‘natural’ sign prac-
tices and discourses are in fact artificial and arbitrary. If they are like de Saussure
said conventional, they could as well be otherwise, what means that these prac-
tices could be changed. According to this epistemic standpoint, all the symbolic
activities of man are arbitrary or constructed. But the arbitrariness does not mean
any accidentality in the sense of indifference or occasionality. In some respect
the idea refers to the existential choice that is true: the human community has
done a certain choice for one kind of discursive practice, accepted it and maintains
this langue. Yet, as well it could have chosen in another way. Therefore arbitrarity
does not mean any negligence of historic and traditional aspects. Certain series
of events in the past of a society or culture or individual have caused it to choose
such and such practice.
13.A.2 What semioticians say about nature
Accordingly, are there at all any practices legitimized by ‘nature’? There is a whole
school of sociobiology which claims (Edward O. Wilson 1975) that man’s social
activity is based upon biology. With this argument the school obviously represents
a kind of determinism (see a.o. the scheme of Wilson about altruism, egoism and
meanness and their genetic impacts, Wilson 1975: 119). Likewise, the psychoana-
lysis of Freud means the reduction of man’s behaviour into ‘human nature’ which
is as Freud presumed. In fact even so modern a theory as the idea of Julia Kristeva
about khora and symbolic order is based upon the hypothesis of human nature
which appears as a prelinguistic kinetics of desires, rhythms and gestures. This
deeper archaic level of the human mind is always present in man’s symbolic, read:
semiotic, behaviour, and be observed behind it.
In the structural anthropology by Lévi-Strauss nature is seen as the counter
player of the category of ‘nature’. In his study Structures élémentaires de la par-
enté he was looking after rules which at the same time were cultural – hence
conventional – and based on nature, and found only one, the taboo of incest. By
270 | 13.A Metaphors of nature and organicism
his notion of archaic illusion he warned us to consider the so-called traditional

cultures somehow more ‘natural’ and infantile as ours.
Later the view of the Paris school of ‘nature’ was that it was a kind of figure
appearing in texts. By certain mechanisms of discourse it provides us the illu-
sion or meaning effect (effets de sens) that some discoursive practice were, so to
say, natural. A.o. students of Greimas analyzed natural scientific discourses, like
Françoise Bastide (1979) in her essay on Le foie lavé. Approche sémiotique d’un
texte de sciences experimentales (which Greimas himself furnished with a preface
by stating that even such concepts as ‘seen’ or ‘demonstrated’ are mythical phe-
nomena; by them one constructs an object of knowledge on syntactic, taxonomic
level. The author states how Claude Bernard in his speech in 1855 proceeds ac-
cording to a kind of ‘generative course’ although deals with phenomena of natural
world. He builds up level by level more and more complicated entities and takes
into account more and more actors while pondering the formation of sugar in liver.
Another scholar of the School, J. L. Excousseau (1985) in his essay “ ‘Objectivité’ et
‘subjectivité’ dans les sciences physiques” studies the meaning effect of objectivity.
In his foreword Jacques Fontanille says that what is involved is a cognitive calcu-
lus between semiotics of natural world and formal theory.
If we look at the dictionary by Greimas-Courtés and the word nature, we read:
1. La nature désigne, par l’opposition à l’artificiel ou au construit, le donné déjà là ou l’état

dans lequel se situe l’homme dès sa naissance : en ce sens, on parlera des langues naturelles
ou du monde naturel ; 2. Dans le cadre de l’anthropologie structurale, et tout particulière-
ment du système lévi-straussien l’opposition nature/culture est difficile à définir ; dans cette
perspective, la nature ne peut jamais être une sorte de donné premier, originaire, antérieur
à l’homme, mais une nature déjà culturalisée, informée par la culture.
(Greimas-Courtés 1979: 250)
Greimas has also the entry le monde naturel. There are altogether four different
definitions of it.
“Nous entendons par monde naturel le paraître selon lequel l’univers se présente à
l’homme comme un ensemble de qualités sensibles, doté d’une certaine organisation qui
le fait parfois désigner comme ‘le monde du sens commun’ . Par rapport à la structure
‘profonde’ de l’univers, qui est d’ordre physique, chimique, biologique, etc. le monde
naturel correspond, pour ainsi dire, à sa structure ‘de surface’ ; c’est d’autre part, une
structure ‘discursive’ car il se présente dans le cadre de la relation sujet/objet, il est ‘l’énoncé’
construit par le sujet humain et déchiffrable par lui.”
(Greimas, op. cit.: 233)
The other essential definition deals with the language-likeness of the so-called
natural world. Can we verbalize the essence of the natural world? For instance . . .
13.A.3 Auguste Comte | 271
“la zoosémiotique fournirait aisément de nombreux contre-exemples . Il suffira seulement

de noter, contrairement aux langues naturelles, seules capables d’exploiter les catégories
sémantiques abstraites (ou les universaux) les organisations sémiotiques, reconnues à
l’intérieur du monde naturel sont determinés par le caractère implicite de ces catégories .
Surtout le monde nature est un langage figuratif, don’t les ‘figures’ sont faites des ‘qualités
sensibles’ du monde et agissent directement, sans médiation linguistique, sur l’homme.”
Greimas also warns that
“le monde naturel ne doit pas être considéré comme une sémiotique particulière. mais bien
plutôt comme un lieu d’élaboration et d’exercise de multiples sémiotiques. One can distin-
guish there between ‘visions significatives’ and ‘pratiques signifiantes’. To the former belong
expressions like ‘le nuage annonce la pluie’ or ‘la mauvaise odeur signale la présence du
diable’; to the latter vast fields like la gestualité, la proxémique, etc. i.e. les comportements
plus ou moins programmés, finalisés (a priori ou aprés coup) et stéréotypés des hommes,
analysables comme des ‘discours’ du monde naturel.”
Consequently the category ‘nature’ escapes in this theory further and further
away, since the semiotizing activity of man tries to occupy and adopt to itself
greater and greater part of the this field of non-culture – almost in the same
sense as Lotman speaks about the spheres of culture and non-culture (but in
purely anthropological sense). Yet the triumphs of natural science has been here
conceived as precisely contrary process: nature occupies more and more place.
The further the neuro- and other type of cognitive brain research proceeds, the
smaller seems the sphere of culture, the symbolic and spiritual activity of man
to shrink. One considers progress in science that all is rendered measurable.
“Try to measure everything , try to count everything, and what is not measurable
or countable, try to make it measurable and countable” – the old guide line
of natural scientists. Is this not a rather great paradox regarding the semiotic
approach?
13.A.3 Auguste Comte
In his work La philosophie positive Auguste Comte says (in the chapter Considéra-
tions philosophique sur l’ensemble de la biologie):
La philosophie théologique ou métaphysique prend pour principe, dans l’explication des

phénomènes du monde, le sentiment immédiat des phénomènes humaines. La philosophie
positive au contraire subordonne la conception de l’homme à celle du monde. L’étude dir-
ecte du monde a pu seule produire et développer la grande notion des lois de la nature,
fondement de toute philosophie positive. Cette étude, en s’étendant graduellement à des

phénomènes de moins réguliers, a dû être enfin appliqué à l’étude de l’homme et de la
société, dernier terme de son entière généralisation.
(Comte 1911: 160–161)
But Comte also warns – as an opposition to the doctrines of metaphysicians –

that biology should not fall under empietement exagérées de la philosophie inor-
ganique.
Method in which Comte believed in the study of living organisms was com-
parison. He distinguished there the following phases:
1) comparaison entre les diverses parties de chaque organisme déterminé; 2) entre les
sexes; 3) entre les diverses phases que présente l’ensemble du développement; 4) entre les
différentes races ou variétés de chaque espèce; 5) enfin, et au plus haut degré, comparaison
entre tous les organismes de la hiérarchie biologique.
(Comte, op. cit.: 180)
Later he had to admit that the comparative method fitted worse and worse when
one was shifted to the field of human beings:
. . . sa valeur scientifique diminue, pour les organismes supérieurs, à mesure qu’il s’agit
d’appareils et de fonctions d’un ordre plus élévé, don’t on trouve la persistance moins poro-
longée en descendant l’échelle biologique. Tel est surtout le cas des fonctions intellectuelles
et morales, qui, après l’homme deviennent à peine reconnaissables . . .
(Comte, op. cit.: 185)
In other words even Comte admits that phenomena of human action are gradually
more and more individual and not comparable with each other.
13.A.4 German thinkers from Kant to Schiller
Nevertheless, how this issue was dealt with in Comte’s time in Germany, in the
promised country of philosophy? It was thought there that nature could for the
first mean by Latin terms nasci (to be born, to originate) something which had
emerged or grown without help, like the birth of the whole world. Yet in the second
place, it means the essence, nature like human nature (Michael Inwood 1992). In
both sense nature is something else than culture, at the same time opposed to art
and anything artificial. Nature is opposed to man and his spirit. From this stems
the distinction Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften. According to
Kant, the a priori principles of natural sciences were matter, force and movement,
and the movement had further two directions: attraction power and propulsive
power. Yet in his Kritik der Urteilskraft Kant ponders the teleological character of
nature. In the chapter Dinge als Naturzweck sind organisierte Wesen (Things as
natural goals are organized essences) gives rather exact definition to what means
that an object is a part of nature, natural:
So one requires from a thing or body (Körper) which by its inner possibility is taken as
nature’s goal, that its parts together, both regarding its form and relations of its connection,
produce mutually from their own causality a whole, whose concept is again (in the being
which provides such an object with its particular causality) the cause following the principle
which says that the influencing cause has to be joined together with the final cause of goal.
(Kant, the chapter Kritik der teleologischen Urteilskraft, 1974: 322)
Then Kant confirms that in such a natural entity or body or product (Produkte)
each part has to be taken as a tool or organ, since it exists for the sake of itself
and of the whole. Yet even this is not sufficient (since it can be an artwork, and
therefore exist only for its goal), but it is also an organ serving other parts, not
any means for art, but material for all nature producing tools: only then such a
product or entity as organized and organizing itself, can be called natural goal.
(This Kantian statement can be later scrutinized as a kind of episteme to all such
products and constructions of European culture, which claim to be or of which it
is claimed that they are dictated by ‘nature’, self-organizing entities, whether they
be societies of art works, let us say compositions, Kant, op. cit.: 321–322.)
However, Kant still continues: “Organized being is not any machine: it has a
moving force. It has in it some building force, namely such one which it gives to
matter, which does not have it, or the forwards-unfolding building force (bildende
Kraft); it cannot be explained by mere capacity (mechanism) of movement (Kant,
op. cit.: 322). Therefore for Kant the organized entities manifest nature’s own goal
and intention or Zweck, what constitutes the basis for the teleology of nature. Such
teleological feature cannot be any longer reduced into mere causality. “Nichts ist
in ihm umsonst zwecklos, oder einem blinden Naturmechanismus zuzuschreiben”
(ibid.: 324).
In any case Schelling went still farther away. He adopted from Spinoza the
medieval view about natura naturans or building nature as an opposition to
natura naturata or builded nature. Nature consisted like the sphere of the spirit,
of phases, steps or levels or Stufen, which Schelling called by the term Potenzen
(forces). The steps of development in nature were more or less parallel to man’s
developmental phases. Nature is intelligence transformed into the rigidity of
being.
Hegel criticized the natural philosophy of Schelling, and particularly its ana-
logies, but adopted from Schelling the view that nature is petrified (versteinerte)
intelligence. However, Hegel does not carefully distinguish between logics and
natural philosophy, since to his mind the logical idea liberates itself, puts itself
into movement (sich entlasst) as a free decision (Entschluss) and determines itself
as external or intuitive. Entschliessen signifies since the beginning opening but
the prefix ent- means separating. Therefore the logical idea does not directly trans-
form itself into life, but nature returns to its beginning and remains mere space.
There it has various phases like mechanics (time and space, matter and move-
ment), physics, organic physics (organic life). Each phase is shifted to a higher
phase just like categories are connected to each other in logics. Nature does not
have a history.
Nevertheless, one central idea of Hegel was to show that mind – even when
it observes nature – is itself also originating from nature. This were not possible
if nature would consist only of units and processes, which were completely alien
to the mind. What remains unclear in Hegel’s philosophy is whether his nature
means the nature of natural scientists or nature as such. Moreover, to which ex-
tent the natural phenomena are necessarily a priori: as a contrast to the idea they
were fortuitous. Hegel’s method was to compare the phenomenon (Erscheinung)
to a conceptual determinant (Begriffsbestimmung) supposing that there is some
general scheme of nature, whose ways of realization are accidental. But where
the distinction goes, he does not reveal (here I have summarized Hegel following
Inwood’s interpretation, Inwood 1992: 195).
Hegel was not fascinated by Schelling’s idea of blending to nature, but he sees
the spirit to be in a conflict with nature. He supports the view by Hobbes, that the
state of nature means war of all against all. When man thinks of something he at
the same time changes it. Therefore when man thinks of nature, it becomes less
alien. The practical activities set forth this work, for instance the transformation
of nature into park, the production of artefacts, etc.).
Yet, after all one of the most fascinating definitions of nature is found at
Friedrich Schiller. I have elsewhere dealt with J. W. v. Goethe and his insight of
nature, particularly in his Metamorphose der Pflanzen and how it influenced
upon music theory (see Tarasti 2003: 3–25). The interesting conception of nature
by Schiller is found in his essay Über naïve und sentimentalische Dichtung (1795).
The essay launches with an impressive definition of the concept of nature or
rather by a statement that ‘nature’ is itself our own notion:
There are moments in our lives in which we dedicate a kind of love and touching attention
to nature in plants, minerals, animals, in the manners of primal world and peasant people,
not because they would please our senses or would satisfy our understanding or taste (for
both also the contrary can be true), but because they are a part of nature. Every more refined
mind, who does not lack ability to feel, experiences this when he walks out of doors, lives
in the countryside or visits thinkers of old times, briefly when is surprised by a glance at the
building nature.
(Schiller 1795/1997: 3)
According to Schiller, our observations of nature are naïve. We experience a.o. art
as a contrast to nature. “Nature in this sense is to us nothing else than a Dasein
with its own laws, the stability of entities by themselves, existence by its own and
unchangeable laws.” (Schiller, op. cit.: 3).
After listing various objects of nature Schiller at the end states about them:
Not these objects but the ideas which appear via them are what we love. We love in them
the silent creative life, tranquil activity by itself, the existence by its own laws, the inner
necessity, the eternal unity with itself.
(op. cit.: 4)
Better one could not define what we in this essay understand by the concepts of
‘nature’ and ‘organism’.
They (natural objects) are what we were, they are what we have to become. We were part of
nature like they, and our culture has to lead us back – in its journey to reason and freedom –
to guide us back to nature . . . We are free, and necessary, we change, by they stay the same.
(op. cit.: 4–5)
In fact Schiller determines in his naïve attitude a kind of iconic sign relation-
ship. His category ‘the necessary’ represents iconic isomorphism between man
and nature. Instead, his concept of ‘freedom’ means the same as the arbitrary,
conventional sign relationship. We are free to form our discourse as we wish. In
this sense we are in our semioses detached from nature.
A. W. Schlegel has in his essay Poesie defined two species of poetry, which
are akin to Schiller, but also deviate from it in essential respects. When thinking
of what might be organic/inorganic art and music the idea of A. W. Schlegel is
crucial (in fact he is by his definition looking after the same as Julia Kristeva by
her notions of khora/symbolic order). The two classes of Schlegel are Naturpoesie
and Kunstpoesie:
For art poetry holds true the historical development of different kinds of art, their mingling
together etc. The natural poetry manifests via artistic poetry, but it is eternal and universal
because it is based upon nature of man. By it we finally attain the natural history of art. It
portrays the emergence and necessary origin of art, and manifests only by such arts, whose
organs are natural to man. The natural organs of art are activities whereby man expresses
his innermost and for it most apt tools are words, tones and gestures. They are the basis of
poetry, music and dance.
(Schlegel 1994: 102–103)
His distinction is thus the same as our hypothesis of beginning on the ‘organic’
and inorganic’ art. The organic art appears often via the inorganic and through it,
like the natural poetry via the art poetry.
We can follow this reasoning in the development story of Occidental ‘soul’

from the Church father and antique thinkers until the outburst of the ‘modern’.
The ‘modern’ means that man becomes conscious of his interiority – and at
the same time necessarily his discrepancy from cosmic order of nature. The deists,
and still John Locke thought that there was the order created by the Providence, to
which human life belonged as a part of the Divine place of this cosmos. We realize
this when we look at the ‘Order of things’. In fact one returns to this in romanti-
cism, or we reach again the unity with cosmos when we listen to the voice of nature
within us. Like Charles Taylor has summarized this view: “We have to re-establish
the contact with the impulse of nature within ourselves” (Taylor 1989: 370).
This doctrine, which is compatible with the previous deism in the sense that
the Divine order appears in nature and in us as a part of nature, was formulated in
a figurative form also by romantic poets. The poem by Friedrich Schlegel: Durch
alle Töne tönet / Im bunten Erdentraum / Ein leiser Ton gezogen / für den der heim-
lich lauschet contains the same idea. The naïve attitude by Schiller meant a re-
discovered unity with nature whereas the sentimental attitude the fact that even
when we get detached from Nature we stay longing for it. Goethe said: Genie ist
wiedergewonnene Naivität. In congeniality man returns to nature.
13.A.5 Différance
But as Taylor states the romantics thought in addition that nature had to manifest
via human action and this leads us, according to him, to the typical romantic
expressivist theory. Every man is individual and different. This originality is the
standard following which we have to live. The concept of individual difference is
granted in all its banality. But it is not what Derrida later understood by différance.
Derrida’s différance is rather a separation from cosmos, a kind of primal order.
This caused that man was able to define his signs as arbitrary constructions.
Nature or the realm of the signifié was irrefutably pushed behind the fence
of the small line dividing the sign into signifier and signified. No immediate
iconicity or isomorphism, identification, return to nature beyond this small line
and its frontier was any longer possible. All that which remained beyond the line
represented the Other. However, as early as here one can see how in a deeper
sense the philosophy of the Other is not the primary philosophy of mankind. At
the end all the distinctions disappear and as Schiller said we become again a part
of nature, we blend to cosmos, and return to the primal order of things.
In fact, in this manner the important event of semiosis takes place: the cre-
ation of the original distinction, the emergence of the proper Derridean différance
as a difference between the signifier and the signified. The arbitrariness and
13.A.5 Différance | 277
conventionality between them symbolizes man’s separation from cosmos and

‘nature’. Moreover, the small line in this familiar diagram can well represent an
entirely third relationship in the structure of sign. It would change the dyadic
sign theory into triadic. John Deely has in his philosophical inquiries emphasized
that sign is not any object among other objects, even less any ‘thing’. Sign is a
relationship. Since Deely is Peircean he believes that this element is created by a
third element, interpretant.
In the dyadic or binary sign theory again the signifier and signified are apart
from each other, but they are united by the small horizontal line, which could be
well thickened into an entire sphere, no-man’s land between signifier and signi-
fied, to that area in which the arbitrary contract about signification is signed. It is
the field where also modalities exercise their power. It is the place where power
is enacted, in which someone determines the contract. This ‘someone’ can be of
course the Heideggerian das Man, but well also some specific entity in the process
of signification - let it be a nation, culture, group, school class, or dominant, who
sets the signs in their proper places.
Figure 13.1: Old and new sign theory
To this new sign diagram we can insert many dichotomies of Western culture, like
nature and culture. Nature is the area repressed by culture under it. Romantics
thought that nature was allowed to appear through the line or wall or filter or grill
when a subject listened to his inner voice in which nature spoke to him.
Sometimes it spoke via a certain actor somewhat like Erda, Mother of Earth
appears in Rhinegold amidst the fighting gods and giants. Culture can be the same
as civilisation, which gives nature articulation. Instead of culture one can also
imagine Kristeva’s ‘symbolic order’ when the voice of nature is heard via ‘semiotic
khora’. Roland Barthes applied the idea Kristeva about phenotext (culture) and
genotext (nature) to song and spoke about pheno- and genosong. In the place
of signifier one can insert the shadows of Plato’s cave metaphor, whereas under-
neath looms the real world of ideas. The small line represents also mimesis in the
sense of Paul Ricoeur. What is involved is also distinction manifest/immanent,
parole/langue, or Sebeok’s language/modeling systems, which are just situated

under the spoken languages; this can also mean surface/deep structure, same-
ness/otherness, etc. almost endlessly.
Major part of semiotic processes take shape following this diagram. But what
does the small line represent? Wall, gate, filter, window? If we draw arrows to the
scheme leading from down to up, what does this represent?
Figure 13.2: Filter between signifier and signified
Do the arrows represent the original semiotic movement, force, energy, move-
ment, which yields the expression, that which is meant in German by the term
Ausdruck?
Then the arrow down would mean what v. Uexküll understood by his concept
Merken whereas the movement up would be the same as user, to express (in my
own theory). Wirken by Uexküll would then convey what happens in the border-
line between signifier and signified horizontally, action by signs.
There is also another class of otherness which is necessary and is connected
to the temporality of our existence. We cannot know what happens in the future –
albeit the category of nature forces us to think of nature as a goal-directed entity,
as something Zweckmässiges like Kant said. Nature has its telos, goals. By recog-
nizing them we can guess the ways whereby the Other becomes the Same. We have
to become unified with the telos of nature. Since romantics thought that nature
represented the inner voice of man, man when becoming himself, significant to
himself, also became a part of cosmos. By this means the transcendent cosmic
order was realized in the dimension of man’s interiority. Yet why the inner voice
should be heard somewhere by someone? Schlegel’s poem postulates precisely
someone who listens, but not actively, but ‘secretly’. This means that by particip-
ating to external communication, the outer dialogue with the world man does not
find himself and his cosmos. This happens only by being in autocommunication
with oneself.
In any case the expression theory or Taylor’s ‘expressivism’ means that man
is still apart from cosmos, and that he from this subject position has to express
himself to someone and by some means. This is remarkably more that any mimesis
or doctrine of imitation. Man does not only imitate nature or himself by copy-
ing them into his signs, but expresses himself via his signs. Man needs signs in
order to express himself. Husserl’s distinction between Bedeutungszeichen and
Ausdruckszeichen comes here to the foreground. However Taylor is right when
he says that the expressivism theory has become the most central content of the
‘modern’ project. When we detach from it the nature’s voice felt intuitively by
the romanticists, which speaks inside and due to which when expressing himself
man expresses cosmos and returns to union without, when this connection is
eliminated we are shifted to the age of the postmodern: the expressivism of each
man, society, culture, style period without taking care of other subjects express-
ing themselves. There are no unifying standards connecting various individuals,
no Kantian categorical imperatives, which would unite various subjects. There is
mere self-expression on the basis of accidental taste judgements. Therefore the
postmodern is the continuation of the modern, but its decline.
Here we have already a lot of ingredients for a philosophical interpretation of
semiotic theories, but our image of nature metaphors were not complete without
one thinker, Jakob v. Uexküll. Although it is true that he came to influence semi-
otics as late as in the last decades (notwithstanding Italy; Ugo Volli’s oral commu-
nication). Uexküll is the founder of the so-called biosemiotics.
13.A.6 In biosemiotics
The cornerstones of Uexküll’s thought have been presented in his concise essay
Bedeutungslehre (1940), which a.o. shows that a biological approach does not at
all mean Comtean ‘positive’ philosophy in the sense of determinism. Quite con-
trarily, amidst the core of biology we come fairly metaphysically sounding conclu-
sions. According to Uexküll, the movement in nature was not mechanic causality,
but was based upon two significant processes: Merken – to signify – and Wirken –
to react. He thought that any object could serve as carrier of meaning (Bedeutungs-
träger). This means two things: either the object is a so-called Merkmalträger,
carrier of sign, which is received by a subject. Or it is this subject whom Uexküll
calls receiver of meaning (Bedeutungsempfänger). Nevertheless, a subject must
possess a particular organ or Merkmalorgan in order to receive it.
According to Uexküll, all significant forms in nature from the shapes of clouds
to the corollas of buttercups floating in the wind are significant. Significant form
which has a duration is always the creation of some subject and not that of a mech-
anical object. The organs and their forms of all the plants and animals contain
significant factors. The next diagram illustrates this:
Figure 13.3: The Uexküll model of semiosis
The most important statement by Uexküll is that every organism lives in its own
subjective world of signification, Umwelt. There is no objective Umwelt, common
to all. When we walk through a meadow, the ‘meadow’ represents completely dif-
ferent realities according to whether it is a plant, insect, cow, or man. He compares
each organism to a kind of clock mechanism whose bells start to ring when the
binds composed by organs start to pull them. These binds are those signs from
Umwelt which it accepts as its proper Bedeutungsträger.
For Uexküll each organism is a formation which consists of living cells. They
all have their Ich-Ton, or Me-Tone. The tones of these organs ultimately form the
Lebenston, living tone of the organism in question. Uexküll observes a spider wav-
ing its net. It does not see itself, its net and the thickness of its knots. As little it
is seen by a fly which flies to the net. Spider sews its net before any fly has flied
to it. Therefore it is not able to build the net according to the model given by any
particular fly, but its own a primal image of a fly. Uexküll exclaims:
Haloo! I hear how mechanists shout: but here the Umweltlehre becomes a metaphysics. The
one who looks after causal factors outside the concrete world is naturally a metaphysician.
Well, good. Then in addition to theology is the present physics also metaphysics.
(Uexküll 1940: 21)
Organisms are determined by a score unperceivable for senses. It rules over tem-
poral and spatial dimensions which constitute properties of an organism. There-
fore there is primal score of both a fly and a spider. Between them there is a cer-
tain connection. Behind the phenomena the unity of various primal images and
melodies is realized according to an all-encompassing plan of signification. All
the organ subjects and organ melodies form the symphony of an organism says
Uexküll (op. cit.: 31). Meaningful factors in plants and meaning carriers in animals
function as a kind of counterpoint.
Like in a duetto both parts have to be written to correspond note by note each other, in the
same manner are in nature the meaning factors in a contrapuntal relationship with meaning
receivers. The development of the forms of living beings becomes only then comprehensible
when we are able to infer from them nature’s own composition study.
The highlight of Uexküll’s essay is the chapter entitled Die Kompositionslehre der
Natur (op. cit.: 32). All the natural phenomena are based at least upon the pres-
ence of two factors just like in the harmony the minimum are two simultaneous
tones: the meaning carriers offered by objects and the meaning receivers con-
tained in subjects. When two organisms are in a harmonic sign relationship with
each other, it is necessary first to judge which one of the organisms serves subject
and which as object, i.e., meaning carrier.
If we know the ‘functional’ sphere by organisms we can clarify the signifying
and reacting aspect (Merken und Wirken) of both of them as a kind of counterpoint
(somewhat like in a Bakhtinian dialogue). The semiotic nature of the biology by
Jakob v. Uexküll has been further clarified by his son Thure (for instance in his
essay “Endosemiosis” 1993). Basing upon this I have scrutinized two species of
signs, endo- and exosigns and their interaction (see chapter in the book). There we
are far from the reduction thesis of the positivists, i.e., the principle that the phii-
phenomena were reducible to ph-phenomena or physical phenomena. Rather the
contrary is true.
We try to resolve the problem itself or what we mean when we speak in general
about nature and organism as epistemic categories. Thure v. Uexküll thinks that
Jakob’s Umweltlehre particularly well fits together with Peirce’s triadic semiotics.
But there is no reason to presume that it were the only semiotic theory, which were
compatible with the idea of Umwelt. The concept of Umwelt is evidently related
to Greimas’s isotopy and Lotman’s semiosphere or more specifically to culture.
Organism, a semiotic actor or subject, like Uexküll says can fall to its proper or
wrong isotopy. It can fall into the semiosphere to which it belongs or outside it.
Each culture has also its own Ich-Ton, according to which it recognizes the signs
around it (Merken) and functions in turn (Wirken) in the sphere of non-culture

surrounding it. What does not belong to Umwelt, belongs to the Otherness.
13.A.7 Semiogerms
Which kind of dynamic relationship prevails between an organism and its Um-
welt, isotopy, or semiosphere? I want to present alternatives with five different
theses or the cases as following: we can speak of particular ‘semiogerm’ or ‘semio-
cell’ or ‘semio-actor’, which notions would cover both biological and cultural,
vegetarian and animal as well as human worlds. It functions as follows:
1) a semiogerm grows from its own Umwelt ‘organically’: it lives and feels to be
there at home. Umwelt is the Heimat, home region in the semiotic sense of the
semiogerm.
2) the relationship of a semiogerm to the Umwelt is temporal or historical pro-
cess or it can grow gradually into it or out of it (Goethe’s metaphors of Ham-
let’s character as a seed of an oak planted into a two small a pot).
3) a semiogerm lives in a complex Umwelt or in a pluri-isotopic environment and
either adapts well to it or destroy in it. In fact the ‘organic’ can mean just
the strength of a semiogerm or ability to adapt itself to various changes of
the Umwelt. For instance postmodern society offers a contradictory cultural
sphere for the activity of a subject.
4) a semiogerm grows in its Umwelt but it develops following its inner ‘code’
to different direction, it is at the end stronger than its Umwelt and destroys
it or transforms it as suitable for itself. This is the property of the strongest
semioactors: at the end they completely dominate their own Umwelt.
5) a semiogerm becomes again implanted into an environment alien to it (for
instance a semioactor is moved to another culture, milieu, a plant or animal
species is transported to another sphere, in the arts a style is borrowed from
an earlier period, a citation, etc.); it can also encapsulate there or remain
without a dialogic Merken/Wirken relationship to its environment. Or then
it can start to change its Umwelt familiar to it. What is involved then is not
any Einfühlung, which is an enlivening by acquaintance, but Ausfühlung, a
recognition outwards, the transformation of the Other into the Same.
Chapter 13.B
Metaphors of nature and organicism in the
epistemology of music
A “biosemiotic” introduction to the analysis of Jean Sibelius’s
symphonic thought
13.B.1 On the musically “organic”
A crucial part of the aesthetics of Western art music deals with the concepts of
the organic and organicism. In a still broader context, music is connected to the
episteme of “nature”. According to Claude Lévi-Strauss, by music we become con-
scious of the physiological roots of our being. In learned music, a special “pas-
toral” style was developed to portray nature. For example, many of the so-called
topics of the classical style relate to nature and the outdoor life, such as the horn
signals in Weber and at the opening of Beethoven’s Les adieux. When Adorno said
that “Sibelius’s music is all Nature” (Es ist Alles Natur), this statement referred to
many things, but for him it was overall a negative aesthetic category in the musico-
social situation in 1937. Closer inspection shows, however, that Jean Sibelius’s
work ranks alongside the “Nature music” of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and
the overture to Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The inconsistency in
Adorno’s thinking was that, when Sibelius evoked nature it was doomed immedi-
ately, but if Mahler did it, then it represented the progressive Hegelian Weltlauf.
Nature appears in so many ways in the aesthetics of Western art music that
only Arthur Lovejoy, in his classic Nature as Aesthetic Norm (1948), has attempted
to list them all. Nature can mean human nature, the cosmic order, imitation
of nature, truthfulness, objective beauty, simplicity, symmetry, balance, the
primacy of emotion, spontaneity, naïveté, primitivism, irregularity, avoidance of
symmetry, the expression of artist’s voice, the fullness of human life, the savage,
the fecundity, evolution, and so on. All of these categories obtain in music.
Along with the development of the idea of absolute music – which meant
instrumental music – there emerged the idea of the symphony and symphonism.
This notion was in turn intimately related to the idea of organic growth. This aes-
thetic norm took hold, becoming an influential value in the entire tradition of
symphonic music. In some countries, such as Finland, to write a symphony is
still considered the high-mark of a career, whereas in France people shrug their
shoulders and remark, “Symphonie, c’est lourd, c’est nordique”. As is known, De-
284 | 13.B Metaphors of nature and organicism in the epistemology of music
bussy once left a concert hall in the middle of a Beethoven symphony, complain-
ing “Oh no, now he starts to develop.”
According to Ernst Kurth, there were two important lines of development in
the history of Western art music. One was the periodic formal principle, based on
the lied and the march and developed by Viennese classicism. It is characterized
by clear-cut two-, four-, and eight-bar units, out of which more expansive mu-
sical forms could be composed. The other principle was linear art, independent of
any strict measures and bar lines, which started with Palestrina’s polyphony and
culminated in J. S. Bach’s melodies, an example being the freely undulating line
of the Chromatic Fantasy. These two principles were the basic forces of musical
formation. In addition, for Kurth music was kinetic energy. The aural, manifest
form (signifier) of music was not essential; music only appeared by means of or
was represented by it. Thus, all of music approaches the status of “nature” if one
interprets the latter in a Bergsonian way as élan vital, or living energy. For Kurth
music was “organic” when it followed a free motor impulse. Quadrangular, peri-
odic rhythm was for him something artificial, a kind of “cultural” filter overlaid
upon nature, even though it was based on corporeality in the sense of singing
and marching.
At approximately the same time as Kurth, another music theoretician in the
German field, Heinrich Schenker, developed his own conception of tonal music,
which was also based on “nature”. Nature was for Schenker the triad, produced
by the natural overtone series, which he called the “chord of nature” (Urklang),
whose intervals were filled by a primal melodic line plus a bass, together forming
the Ursatz. Prolongation of the latter by means of artistic improvisation produced
the only “good” music. Good music – that is, the only music worth analyzing and
listening to – was of course tonal music and particularly German tonal music.
Schenker drew his concept of organicism from Goethe and the latter’s doctrine of
the metamorphosis of plants.
Kurth and Schenker represent two different views of organicism in music.
According to Kurth, organicity or “kinetic energy” arises primarily in the ebb and
flow of the linear, horizontal movement of music, or in semiotic language, in its
syntagmatic structure. By contrast, for Schenker the organic appears in the ver-
tical movement from a deep structure towards the surface, from Hintergrund to
Vordergrund, that is to say, in music’s paradigmatic structure. From the syntag-
matic perspective, the organic nature of music obtains by a certain arabesque
movement. L’art nouveau, for instance, would be an ideally “organic” style period,
with its twining arabesques in leaf-like shapes. From the paradigmatic view, or-
ganicism is seen as the inner growth and unfolding of music. Stefan Kostka, in his
Materials and Techniques of Twentieth-Century Music, defines what the organic
is in music, as opposed to the inorganic. In the sub-chapter called “Nonorganic

Approaches to Musical Form” he writes the following:
A traditional painting depicts something, and if the painting is a good one, every part of
the canvas contributes to the effectiveness of the visual message that the artist is trying to
convey. In traditional literature every passage has its purpose – fleshing out a character,
setting the mood, developing the plot, and so on. The same is generally true of music in the
European tradition: the composition is considered to be greater than the sum of its parts, a
work of art in which each passage has a function that is vital to the overall plan of a work.
Think of any tonal work that you know well, and imagine what it would be like if its parts,
themes, transitions and so forth were randomly rearranged. It might be interesting to see
how it would turn out, but the piece would almost certainly not be as effective as a whole.
(Kostka 1999: 152–153)
Kostka goes on to emphasize that twentieth-century music evidenced a wide-

spread reaction against the traditional organic view, that is to say, against the idea
of a composition as a teleological process. He singles out the so-called “moment”
form of Stockhausen as the antithesis of organicity.
In a broader sense, however, the organicism of music can be connected with
the general problem of the arbitrary, conventional articulation of a sign system
versus the iconic or indexical articulation of same: all grammars, including mu-
sical ones, are in Saussurean theory arbitrary and constructed, based on a set of
particular rules. These rules can further be made explicit and thereby artificially
generate music endlessly, according to the model, or langue.
Contrary to this approach – which exemplifies the idea of nonorganic form – is
the view of music as a design or Gestalt, terms used by the Canadian composer and
music semiotician, David Lidov. Grammar, as a set of static rules, can of course
never be organic. Only can design or gestalt be related to something living. In
support of this view, we can note that reformers and inventors of musical gram-
mars, such as Schönberg, rarely number among “organic”-sounding composers.
Nevertheless, in some cases even music written according to serial techniques can
sound “organic”, as do symphonies by Einojuhani Rautavaara.
This leads us to ask, At what point do we experience music as being organic?
Is it the case that organicity, when experienced consciously, no longer seems as
organic as it did before? In other words, is the organic an unconscious category,
such that we should return to Rudolph Réti’s ideas on the thematic process? In
some cases it seems that organicity is the consequence of a certain activity of the
musical enunciator, whether composer or interpreter. If too much deliberation
goes into the composition, then the resulting music is no longer organic. Only
when composition takes place in a trance or under inspiration is the result or-
ganic. Such a case would involve a special dialogical relationship between the
utterance and the act of uttering, between the text and its producer.
Yet even this definition does not help us to clarify what “organic” means as a
quality of a musical text. Why is one composition organic and another one not?
One explanation is that all mechanical repetition and potpourri-like formations
are inorganic. This idea is advanced by Boris Asafiev in his intonation theory. As
late as in Beethoven’s symphonies “a composition became an organically and
psychologically motivated whole, which unfolds as growth and development”
(Asafiev 1977, vol. 2: 489). As an example Asafiev points to the overture to Wagner’s
Die Meistersinger. It is a hidden symphony, whose parts – sonata allegro, andante,
scherzo, and finale – have been blended together in such a way as to follow each
other logically. They occur, one after the other, as various phases of a cycle, as
a single line of development (ibid.: 490). Asafiev also calls such an organic form
“dialectic”.
If such a fusion is to be taken as particularly “organic”, then it is exemplified
by such pieces as Liszt’s B-minor Sonata, Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, Sibelius’s
Seventh Symphony, as well as the blending together of the first movement and
scherzo in the latter’s Fifth Symphony. Reminiscent of Asafiev’s view is Carl Dahl-
haus’s interpretation of Beethoven’s symphonic form, when he insists that mu-
sical form is not like a scheme that can simply be filled with individual themes
(Dahlhaus 1985: 369). Beethoven did not compose “in” form but “with” form. He
may, for example, shift transitional material or aspects of the main theme into
a subordinate theme. The difference between Schubert and Beethoven is thus
clear. In Schubert the form is associative, potpourri-like, but in Beethoven it is
“developing variation” (which term Dahlhaus borrows from Schönberg): the idea
of connecting certain motivic passages to each other is experienced by the listener
as a musical logic and as a counterpart to mere association.
In semiotic terms, syntagmatic linearity alone is not sufficient – neither inner
iconic similarity nor mere inner indexicality. The musical form has to be experi-
enced as somehow goal-directed, or in Kantian terms, als zweckmäßig, otherwise
the music is not organic. Asafiev, too, pays attention to the goal-directedness of
music, distinguishing between two types of telos or finalities in the symphonic
literature: either the cheerful and free fusion of the personality with the cosmos
(Beethoven) or spiritual pain and isolation amidst the crowd, oblivion, and tragic
destruction. For Asafiev, musical finality is achieved when some leading idea is
revealed, which captures attention and out of which the growing waves of devel-
opment emerge (1977, vol. 2: 483). This Asafievian ideal is almost literally realized
in Sibelius. In the Fifth Symphony, for example, there is a struggle to the end
between these two forms of finality, and the listener remains unaware of which
solution the composer has chosen.
Thus, in order for music to be organic, it is not enough that there be motivic
and thematic unity, i.e., that the music consist of more than fortuitous variation.
Nor is it enough that these variations follow each other indexically and smoothly.
Music has to progress towards some goal or telos; music must be directional. But
is not all music as a temporal art directed towards something? Here we do not
mean the primary temporality of music but temporality as “marked”, as Robert
Hatten (1994) might put it. In organic music, musical time is organized towards a
certain goal.
How is this goal created? That is, How does a listener know that the music has
a goal and a direction? Leonard B. Meyer, in his Explaining Music (1978), presents a
theory of melody that emphasizes well-formed melodic shapes. There are certain
musico-cognitive archetypes, the breaking or deficient fulfilment of which causes
the listener to remain waiting for the right solution, the correct design. (On this
view, Lidov’s theory of design would be sufficient to explain the organic nature
of music.) For instance, if we hear at the beginning a “gap-fill” type of melody,
then a telos of music is created by the unfilled gap, which may not be completed
until the very end of the piece. This tension keeps the music in motion and pro-
duces the kinetic energy, the catalysing impulse. An example is the opening of
Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, where a motive sounds that is incomplete in three re-
spects. Firstly, this motive, which Tawaststjerna calls a “bucolic signal”, is first
rhythmically syncopated and heard in a strange 12/8 meter. Secondly, its verse
structure is irregular, as Lorenz Luyken has remarked (1995: 42–43). Thirdly, it
is based on an open fifth-fourth intervallic shape, which causes the listener to
remain waiting for these gaps to be filled (see Figure 13.4).
Harmonically the music hovers around the six-four chord of the E flat ma-
jor, a device similar to that which occurs at the beginning of Beethoven’s Sonata
op. 31 no. 3. Beethoven lets the phrase cadence on the tonic rather soon, however,
whereas Sibelius delays it until the very end of the symphony. There we also hear
the fifths and fourths filled with a stepwise scale passage and leading tones: it is
the great and relieving climax of the whole work, all the more since we have been
oscillating between various tragic alternatives just before it arrives. The extremely
restless and ambiguous theme on the Neapolitan chord ceases its wandering and
is filled with a scale in E flat minor (which the sketches show to be one of the
symphony’s founding ideas). But even at the end of the symphony, where the
tonic is confirmed with a cadence, rhythmic balance is still not reached, since
not all of the cadential chords are on strong beats. There is a particular irony in
this, a musical pun, the wish to show that this is not altogether too serious – a rare
moment in Sibelius! The situation recalls what happens in a play when the clown
returns and addresses the audience directly to recite the final words, or as in the
closing morality segment of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
Music thus has its own telos, which sets energies in motion. They emerge from
musical designs, gestalt qualities, of which we expect the completed form. Accord-
Figure 13.4: Sibelius, beginning of the Fifth Symphony
ing to Jan LaRue (1994), music has a special dimension of growth that binds all the
other musical parameters together – this term in itself sounds rather “organic”.
Can “organicism” arise from some other quality of the musical texture? For
instance, Sibelius’s music typically has fields that constitute the elements for the
so-called “space dramaturgy” analyzed by Luyken (1995). Sibelius’s music often
seems to be driven into a kind of fenced-in area, from which there is no exit. The
formation of such fields was already evident in early Sibelius, for instance, in
En Saga (in Finnish: Satu), realized by means of a simple repetitive form. That is
to say, the same melody or theme recurs until, by repetition, it loses its character
as a musical subject that distinguishes itself from its surroundings, its musical
Umwelt. The music itself becomes a subjectless environment. This is a particularly
Sibelian way of deactorializing the music, so as to make it an impersonal and ve-
getative natural process in which no thinking or feeling subject can be seen. In the
Fifth Symphony, such a field is formed by the chromatic lament motives in the first
movement (score numbers J–M), which one hears for a very long time. (Such a situ-
ation is not far from Ligeti’s field technique, which in turn is not the same as the
“sonoristic” fields of the Polish school [see Mirka 1997].) But this predominantly
“static” field arises from a continuous, micro-organic process. How does one enter
into such a field, and how does one get out of it? In the Fifth Symphony the field
is simply exhausted: one does not leave it by means of a musically determined
“escape route”, such as modulation (as occurs in the Second Symphony with the
D minor field in the Finale which leads into the parallel major.)
The question of the organic nature of music can also be interpreted as a ques-
tion of the right method of analysis. One can imagine that methods based on
musical “functions” would better take into account the organic quality than do
tectonic, segmentational, mechanistic models (to which unfortunately the major
part of music-semiotic analyses belong). The basic problem of organic music does
not at all concern how music can be divided into smaller pieces but rather how
the music coheres.
Boris Asafiev viewed music as consisting of three main functions: initium,
motus, and terminus. In Greimassian semiotics these correspond to the so-called
aspectual semes: inchoativity, durativity, and terminativity. In Claude Brémond’s
narratology, they parallel the three phases of storytelling: virtuality, passage/non-
passage to action, achievement/inachievement. According to Asafiev, the musical
organic process always presupposes these three basic phases. Quite similar the-
ories have been developed elsewhere.¹
But there may be still other means by which music becomes organic. I have
elsewhere (see Chapter 13.A) introduced the biosemiotics and doctrine of Um-
welt by Baltic biologist Jakob v. Uexküll, whose ideas have been provoking lively
discussion among semioticians quite recently. What if we were to take his ideas
seriously in music? As is known, his theory is based on the idea that every organ-
ism functions according to a pre-established “score” which determines the nature
of its Umwelt. The organism connects to that world by two processes, Merken and
Wirken. Every organism has its particular Ich-ton which is determinant of its being
and acting. We can see in this concept an analogy to music, and say that every
theme, every musical motive, every intonation lives in its own, characteristic mu-
sical Umwelt. An organic composer takes into account expressly the relationship
of a musical event to its musical environment. A good example of the relationship
of a theme to its Umwelt would be the variations of the Andante theme in Beeth-
1 Another, interesting “narratological” view of music can be found in the analysis manual of
Ivanka Stoianova, used in her music courses at Paris University VIII. Stoianova takes her ideas
often from her teachers in Moscow.
Figure 13.5: Beethoven, Fifth Symphony, mvt. 2, mm. 106–109
oven’s Fifth Symphony (Figure 13.5). There the main motive is continually shifted
into new, interesting-sounding milieus; the listener pays more attention to these
environments than to the theme itself.
In the classical tradition, melody and accompaniment are derived from the
same material (as at the beginning of Schumann’s C major Fantasy, where the
accompaniment figure is the same as the descending theme in the upper register),
in which case the organic nature of music lies in the interaction of musical event
and its environment. By contrast, the postmodern style – early examples of which
are Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos and even Stravinsky’s neoclassicism – uses
quotation techniques and avoids the aforementioned organic unity. The environ-
ment of the theme must be alienating. That is to say, if the context is tonal, then
the citation has to distinguish itself as something dissonant. And if the context is
atonal, the citation has to be distinguished by its tonality. In Sibelius’s Fifth Sym-
phony, even in the earlier version of 1915, there is a strangely dissonant, piercing
variant of the so-called Neapolitan theme which is superimposed on the “Swan
theme” – this is one of the rare futurist and fauvist moments in all of Sibelius’s
output. There the theme really appears as if it were in a wrong isotopy or musical
Umwelt.
Are there other means by which music can become organic? Wilhelm Furt-
wängler in his writings paid attention to the biological foundation of all music.
However, the use of the term “biology” in music is metaphorical and thus as am-
biguous as the concept of “nature” when applied to any art form. To Furtwängler,
the so-called “absolute” music of the classical period was much more than func-
tional, casual music. Dahlhaus remarks that Vienna’s musically rich and many-
sided Umwelt enabled the emergence of the classical style. But Furtwängler be-
lieves that there was something else as well:
It is not only casual music bound with life . . . it is not directly connected with the ballet, play
or drama, but can also well be so. What it touches, it changes. It gathers into it the fullness of
the entire organic life and reflects it there like in a mirror. It creates from itself the extremely
broad world of independent musical forms – lied form, fugue, sonata form are only its basic
types. It is able to do so because it is enough for itself. It naturally corresponds to man’s
biological presuppositions.
(Furtwängler 1951: 27)
Furtwängler then asks, “What are these biological presuppositions? They are
based on the alternation of tension and relaxation: “The ascending and des-
cending movement of tension and release reflects the rhythm of life: as long
as we breathe, one activity is at rest, the other one in motion. The state of rest
is more original and primal . . . One of the basic doctrines of modern biology is
that in complicated bodily activities . . . the relaxation of tension has a decisive
meaning” (ibid.).
This is certainly an acceptable view. In my own theory of semiotics I speak of
two basic modalities, ‘being’ and ‘doing’, derived from Greimas’s model. But they
also concern the definition of the organic in music (Tarasti 1994). What brings
about being and doing in music? What gives us the impression that we either
simply ‘are’ in music or that something is happening? These questions can be
answered by observation of the temporal, spatial and actorial articulations in mu-
sic. These articulations belong to the music of all cultures, not just to Western art
music.
Furtwängler, however, relates ‘being’ (relaxation) and ‘doing’ (tension) strict-
ly with tonality: “The state of rest in music in its full cogency is only produced by
tonality. Only it is able to create an objectively existing state of rest (subjectively
we can of course consider any personal impression as rest).” Furtwängler is thus
bound to a certain musical ontology. The deepest level of music for him is always
tonal, since it is based on the natural determining force given by the triad. It is the
beginning and the end of everything.
Furtwängler’s tonal ontology is a long-abandoned position, but in the context

of our essay it has a certain meaning. Even some semiotically oriented scholars
base their theories on a “biological” ontology, though without joining it any longer
to tonality as a kind of ahistoric, universal principle. Ivanka Stoianova, for in-
stance, thinks that musical form has two aspects: processual and architectonic.
The processual aspect refers to musical enunciation, and the architectonic evokes
the musical utterance as a ready-made text, as an art-work outside time. Thus
we get two musical counterforces: the kinetic aspect, which is based on motion,
change, process; and a static aspect, which is based on immobility, stability and
architectonics. Musical form as a process, as aural manifestation, and the pres-
ence of an aural architecture are two sides of the same artistic activity.
Architectonic form – the external mould as described by Réti and Kandin-
sky – seems to be an effort to immobilize the stream of music. All musical style
periods, from the classical to the romantic to the avant-garde, include such an
immobilizing effect, which stems from architectonic form. The means of stopping
the musical stream consist of hierarchic, historically determined formal schemes,
whereas processuality appears in transformations and emergent contrasts, such
as developing variation. For Stoianova, the ‘being’ of music is not precisely as it
is for Furtwängler. It is not an ontological or teleological end-state of music to-
ward which everything strives, but is rather the stopping of “normal”, and hence,
“biological”, musical time.
In this sense, generative models are epistemologically contradictory. The idea
of a surface that is gradually generated from a deep structure is based on hierarch-
ies, and thus on something static and architectonic, hence something which stops
the musical movement. This has as its consequence the static, atemporal charac-
ter and artificiality of generative analyses. They are mechanistic elucidations of
musical grammars using hierarchic axiomatic rules. But at the same time, the idea
of a generative course contains the thought of a process, in which the immanent
is in the end made manifest. The generative course thus refers to a basic semiotic
force of the whole universe: the movement from content to expression. Whether
Greimas’s generative course or Chomskyan schemes, generative models can make
explicit the “organic” course of processes of meaning, but at the same time they
contain an inorganic and architectonic aspect, which is a strange principle when
applied to phenomenal musical experience and belongs in this sense to the pro-
ject of the “modern”.
We can try to clarify further what the “organic” in music is, with a more de-
tailed formal and style analysis. A good example is provided by Veijo Murtomäki’s
(1993) study of organic unity in Sibelius’s symphonies. He confirms the import-
ance of organic metaphors among all the representatives of the so-called “dy-
namic” form theory in German musicology. He mentions Kurth, Schenker, Halm
and the continuation of their thought in Schönberg and even Anton Webern. The
musical views of the latter are permeated by the metaphor of a biological organism
that develops from a single, initial idea. From it emerges the inner unity (zusam-
menhangen) of music. (It is interesting to note even here the contradictory tend-
ency of these reformers of musical grammars and pioneers of the “modernist”
project, who used models of thought inherited from romanticism. In addition,
Schönberg and Webern were certainly different persons as theoreticians and com-
posers. How a serial piece can be organic remains in this context unanswered.) In
any case, Murtomäki lists in his study five ways in which music can be organic,
with special emphasis on how Stoianova’s immobilizing forms – such as sonata,
symphony, string quartet, and so on – become organic or processual by means
of cyclic technique. For Murtomäki, organicity obtains when a composition with
more than one movement is made to sound like a whole, and this in turn is the
same as cyclicity. Cyclic procedures can be either external or internal; that is, they
can either unify the materials or join parts together: (1) First, movements may
be linked by similar thematic openings. (2) Either thematic “germs” or cells are
moved almost imperceptibly from one movement to another, or themes appear in
an easily recognizable guise in the later movements. (3) A special motto or idée
fixe may appear in every movement. (4) The principle may be one of family unity:
the parts are connected with metamorphoses of the same theme. (5) The most
sophisticated way is continuous variation, a method of metamorphosis in which
new ideas result from a process of transformation.
The last-mentioned case is the most exciting one. When do we experience in
music that some process “generates” or gives birth to another event? Put another
way, when do we experience that some event T is the consequence of a former
event P? Does event T serve as the telos of event P? What precisely does this mean?
The finale of Sibelius’s Second Symphony is doubtless a good illustration of the
idea of a telos, given the way that it is attained only after much struggle. But we
can also imagine a process during which the listener does not know what will
follow. Only when the result of T is heard after the process of P does one realize,
Yes, this is exactly what everything prior to it was working toward. In such a case,
one cannot say that T serves as a teleological goal of P, since it is perceived as such
only after the fact.
How can we semiotically analyze and interpret such relationships? From a
narratological perspective we can consider some event a subject and its goal to
be the event, an object that is searched for by the subject. At first the subject is
disjuncted from the object, but then reaches or is conjuncted with it, taking it into
possession. For instance, a theme in the dominant key “wants” to be united to
the tonic. Yet this does not quite correspond to the truth, since the result of the
metamorphosis can in fact be something which its preceding event is not aware
of, so to say, or does not even “want”. Only the musical super enunciator – the
composer – knows that event T is a logical, organic result of process P. Or rather,
the subject S is transformed into another subject S1 or Q or X, when the music
steps, as it were, into “otherness”, when it shifts to some kind of non-being via the
process of becoming. What is involved, then, is an organic, abruptly contrasting
shift from a subject S to a subject Q. The subjects S and Q are felt to belong to the
same musical Umwelt, in which we move from the Lebenswelt of subject S to that
of subject Q.
To end this section on the metaphor of the “organic” as a music-theoretical
episteme, we can note that the same thing happens with it as with the notion of
“nature”, discussed above. As Lovejoy’s analysis and our cases show, “nature”
can mean almost anything, both order and disorder. In the same way, organic
unity and growth can mean almost anything whatsoever. Why, then, do we exam-
ine a phenomenon about which we cannot only come to the same conclusion as
did the first-year student mentioned by Umberto Eco, who modestly presented “a
short comment on the universe”? It is because nature and organic growth have
meant something to philosophers and to musical scholars, especially to those
studying symphonic thought. They are notions loaded with strong ideological
concepts, whose precise meaning can be obscure, but which have been and are
still used when we speak about essential things in music. We cannot ignore these
terms only because of the uncomfortable fact that their linguistic usage is not
always logical and coherent. Next I shall ponder their relevance to Sibelius, par-
ticularly regarding his Fifth Symphony.
13.B.2 Sibelius and the idea of the “organic”
One could respond to the challenge posed by Adorno, by claiming that Sibelius’s
music is “organic” whereas Mahler’s music is “inorganic”. In that case, the terms
organic/inorganic would be primarily analytic concepts, such that “organic” mu-
sic would be based on the following conditions: (1) All the musical actors live in
their proper Umwelt; in semiotic terms, the themes move in their proper isotopies.
(2) All the musical material stems from the same source; that is to say, thematicity,
in semiotic terms, would be innerly iconic. (3) All the musical events follow each
other coherently; this is LaRue’s principle of growth, or the inner indexicality of
music. (4) The music strives for some goal; this has to do with temporality and the
aspectual semes of beginning, continuing, and closing.
Sibelius’s music can be experienced in many ways as “organic”. First, many
think that the category of Nature is present therein. As Lorenz Luyken has stated,
Sibelius’s music refers to the pastoral quality, in the manner of Beethoven,
Mendelssohn, and Wagner. There is much evidence, on the part of both Finnish
and non-Finnish scholars, that the poiesis and aesthesis of his music is connected
to Finland’s nature. When Leonard Bernstein introduces Sibelius’s mixolydian
mode in the Sixth Symphony to an audience of young listeners in New York,
he says that it evokes the lonely forests of Finland. When music semiotician
Jean-Jacques Nattiez visited Helsinki in April of 1979, he spontaneously started to
whistle the opening motive of the Violin Concerto when looking at the frozen sea
from the bridge of Seurasaari in Helsinki. But closeness to nature does not make
music innerly, analytically “organic”. It is only a category of reception.
What about the level of poiesis? Erik Tawaststjerna carefully studied the
sketches of the Fifth Symphony and their elaboration. He connects the Fifth Sym-
phony to Scriabin’s ecstatic-mystical view of art and to the Russian composer’s
empathy with the cosmos. After quoting a poem by Scriabin, Tawaststjerna
says, “But it is not erroneous to think what appealed to Sibelius in Scriabin
was precisely the ‘cosmic’ dimension of his music, which is related also to his
efforts to break through the boundaries of tonality.” This quotation has to be
read in the light of our interpretation of the project of the “modern”, insofar as
it represents the detachment of man from “cosmos” and insofar as “organic”
music means a return to this cosmic unity. For Scriabin it meant going to the
extreme limits of tonality (albeit Prometheus closes with an F sharp major tonic).
But in Sibelius the “cosmic” style and rejection of the modernist project meant
expressly the acceptance of tonality. The ecstatic E flat major at the end of the Fifth
Symphony is related to the finale of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, which
also cadences to a similar, waving, clock-like motive. From this we might infer
that the organic style and the return to cosmic unity, in the philosophical sense
advanced by Charles Taylor (1989) in his The Sources of the Self, is not always
the same as the return to tonality. This engagement, this embrayage (Greimas’s
semiotic term), can also take place on levels of the musical text other than spatial
ones.
Tawaststjerna’s study in fact seems to prove Sibelius’s organic symphonic lo-
gic is based upon composer’s way of elaborating the material; it is clearly the cat-
egory of poiesis. Tawaststjerna is moreover inclined to think that the organic qual-
ity of Sibelius’s symphonies emerges as a result of a trance-like process guided by
the unconscious inspiration of the composer. When discussing the creation of the
Fifth Symphony he deals with many of the various ideas found in the sketches,
which Sibelius used in his Fifth or Sixth Symphonies. He compares this process to
a puzzle whose pieces are fragments of a mosaic “floor of the sky” (Tawaststjerna
1978: 61). In this phase the symphony still essentially appears as a paradigmatic
table, and its elaboration is a completely rational, non-organic occupation. But
then Tawaststjerna continues:
“In the case of Sibelius I am inclined to consider his creative work an interaction of inspira-
tional and intellectual components. Their relationship continuously varies. Basically he was
dependent on his inspiration. He had his ‘wonderful’ trances . . . . The shaping of the themes
seems to have happened intuitively.”
(Tawaststjerna 1978: 65)
Nevertheless, if we think of our aforementioned criteria for organicity, one might

state that on a paradigmatic level the organic trait stems from the inner similarity
of the musical substance. Tawaststjerna reduces all the motives of the Fifth Sym-
phony to two: the so-called step motive and the swing motive. But even this is not
enough: the material has to be put into a syntagmatically coherent order. Only
then can we experience music as organic.
Erkki Salmenhaara, another Finnish Sibelius specialist, has a similar view
of Sibelius’s organic techniques. Like Tawaststjerna, he stresses that organicity
emerges in the mind of the composer, who using musical criteria chooses from
an endless group of paradigms those which are meaningful regarding the inten-
ded musical shape. In his study on the symphonic poem Tapiola Salmenhaara
quotes the British scholar Cecil Gray: “The thematic materials in Sibelius . . . seem
to regenerate in a way which the biologists call cell division: they are split and
broken into seven theme units, when every bar of the original organism is subjec-
ted to a development”. Therefore under the conventional formal outline of music
there looms another shape which is dynamic, processual, or, in our terminology,
“organic”.² In the chapter on “Sibelius’s Organic Principle of Variation”, Salmen-
haara starts to deal with the organic nature of the composer’s logic: “By organic
development it must be understood that various results of the development –
different themes and motives – are in an ‘organic’ connection with each other”.
What is interesting here is Salmenhaara’s term “results”. Themes in organic music
can be experienced as results of some process – which is not the same as the telos,
the Kantian Zweck. There are of course processes that from the beginning aim for
a certain goal, but there are also processes whose result is not known in advance.
For instance, the transition to the Finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the long
pedal point on G, leads finally to the theme of victory, which is something like
a product of this process: we know to expect something, but are not sure exactly
what. The same thing occurs with the intermediate section of the Waldstein, which
leads to the sunrise theme of the last movement. Sometimes the result of the pro-
cess is quite amazing, as in Sibelius’s Karelia music, where a long transition takes
place before the theme bursts out: the national anthem of Finland. The result does
2 The differentiation between the static and the mobile recalls Ivanka Stoianova’s distinction
between architectonic and dynamic forms.
not grow organically from the previous material but is a quotation justified by an
extramusical program.
Salmenhaara also defines what is nonorganic music, one example being the
variation sets of the classical style. In them the gestalt of the theme remains the
same; it is just ornamented – think of Unser dummer Pöbel meint or Ah vous dirai-je
Maman by Mozart. On the other hand, Salmenhaara emphasizes that in an organic
variation what is crucial is not the goal of the process but the metamorphosis
itself. “It is like a self-reflecting process: the main thing is not that the develop-
ment form bridges among architectonic climaxes, but the aim is for continuous
transformation, the constant turning of the motives into new shapes.” This latter
comment is of great interest since it excludes telos from organicity: the organic
transformation does not have a goal to strive for; rather, the variation becomes
self-reflexive. What kind of phenomenal experience would this evoke? Doubtless
a kind of static, slowly changing sound field. Has Salmenhaara unknowingly pro-
jected the Ligetian field technique onto Sibelius in order to see him as a represent-
ative of a certain avant-garde movement? If organicity were the same as Ligeti’s
field technique, that would place Sibelius within the panorama of the new music
of the twentieth century. The listener easily experiences such fields as a kind of
stasis, a limbo from which there is no exit. This situation undeniably occurs in
Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, especially at score letters J and K, 1st movement (Fig-
ure 13.6). The Allegro moderato section of K–P, and also the fluttering, Mendels-
sohnian figuration of the strings in the last movement, contain such self-reflexive
organic transformation.
It is essential to this line of reasoning that we speak about music as shapes or
Gestalts but not as grammar, recalling David Lidov’s two principles of “grammar”
and “design”. There are composers, such as Arnold Schönberg, who have concen-
trated on reforming musical grammars. Then there are composers whose main
contribution is at the level of gestalt, who make innovations even when the gram-
mar remains the same. Debussy, Stravinsky, Sibelius seem to belong to this line.
Therefore Adorno could not appreciate them. His hyperrational music philosophy
is definitely bound with the project of the “modern” in the aforementioned philo-
sophical sense. Music is grammar, conventional, arbitrary, and it has to maintain
this aura of artificiality in order to be progressive. Music which functions via iconic
shapes would mean a rejection of the critical distance and consciousness of the
listener. Since over the course of time humankind has become disconnected from
nature and cosmos, one must remain constantly aware of this primal negation
and difference. The return to unity with the cosmos, with nature, would mean the
return to a lawless and barbarous original state (the Germany of the 1930s is an
example). It is always regression. The idea of organic music is precisely to return
the listener to the cosmos, to natural principles which appear as the art of pre-
Figure 13.6: Sibelius, Fifth Symphony, mvt. 1, m. 81 (Wilhelm Hansen)

linguistic gestalts. Organic music is pre-linguistic, non-verbal, in the profound

sense of the word. It is impossible to reduce Sibelius’s music to the language-
likeness of tropes or rhetorical figures.
There is, however, one difficulty in defining the organic, and it is clearly no-
ticed by Salmenhaara when he says, “. . . organic transformation has one special
feature which is difficult to analyze, namely, it is musical by nature. Precisely here
we have the difference between the motivic techniques of Sibelius and Schönberg.
The music of the latter is theoretical and technical in nature rather than based on
musical gestalts.” The twelve tones of a row can be manipulated in many ways
which do not have a meaning-creating shape. Seen in this light, organic music is
precisely music of design.
How, then, can we prove that music based on a complicated motivic technique
is organic? Only a tiny part of all possible motivic transformations is really used.
Only those motives which are musically meaningful are taken into account, and
that is why the organic unity of these motives is also noticeable to the listener. The
musical construction does not follow any external system – just purely musical
logic.
Hence the term “organic” means the same as the “musically logical” which in
turn means the “musically meaningful”. So we have fallen to a circle. What does
it mean for something to be “very musical”? Sometimes it means the rendering
of the emotional content of music, or that the musical performance in some way
touches or speaks to us. But if we say that a musical text is “musical”, that reveals
very little indeed. We cannot only look at the text, the score. We must consider
the entire situation of musical communication, not only the utterance, but the
utterer as well. Only the choice of the human “brain” or enunciator or composer
can make any music organic. Thus, what is involved is a quality that is made mani-
fest by the musical enunciator, in the dialogue between musical material and the
persons who deal with it. Insofar as the musical mind intuitively filters and shapes
musical materials into a certain gestalt quality, music becomes organic. Neither
mere mathematical structure nor grammaticality suffice to make music organic.
Although utterances may be “well-formed” or “grammatical”, we do not neces-
sarily experience them as organic. Principles said to stem from the brain of the
enunciator have been studied by statistic-mathematical methods in Russia, which
methods are derived from the so-called “law of Zipf”. The latter says that, when
all the notes or words of an art work are counted, they can be shown to follow
a certain distribution along the “Zipf curve” (the Estonian scholar Mart Remmel
told about this). Using this model, one can determine when a work is overwritten
or underwritten, that is, when it has too many or too few notes. Works written by a
great master in one breath, as it were, follow the Zipf law better than those written
in episodically. Here the question of the organic is shifted from the textual level
into a cognitive question: How does the enunciator pick those elements which on
the textual level will become organic?
To begin to answer this question, one might try to apply Uexküll’s biosemiotic
theory to music. As discussed above, each organism has its own Ich-ton, which
determines the kinds of messages it receives from the outside, from the Umwelt
that surrounds it. If this concept were applied to music, it would mean that every
composition is a kind of “model” of a living organism, the latter understood in
a certain “as-if” sense. The life of such an organism, its ‘being’ and ‘doing’, is
guided by its view of itself, which helps the organism to choose according to its
“inner” score those signs which it sends and receives. If a musical organism con-
sists of motives, these motives constitute kinds of “cells” that communicate with
each other, as happens in living organisms. This communication is completely
determined by the inner organisation of the organism, its Ich-ton.
Music is the symbolic description of this process. The musical organism that
emerges from the brain of the composer somehow takes shape from a certain basic
idea or isotopy, what Sibelius called an “atmosphere”, which determines which
motives are accepted into this inner process and which ones are rejected. When we
observe this microlevel of musical “cells” the life of the musical organism, we can
follow what some cell or motive or “actor” is doing and how it does so, that is, how
it influences other cells. Sometimes the “act” of a motive at first goes unnoticed,
becoming influential only later. Sometimes the composer decides upon the Ich-
ton of the work as early as in the opening bars. For instance, the core motive of
Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony sounds at the very start of the work. In the same way,
the “bucolic” horn signal at the opening of the Fifth Symphony is a “cell” which,
in order to become a complete gestalt, needs to have its interval filled, and this is
heard only at the end of the symphony. So we can say that, in music as in living
organisms, one cell “calls out” for another. Precisely this type of inner process in
a work makes it organic.
Organicity or organicism is therefore dependent on the enunciator’s – i.e.,
the composer’s – consciousness. In organic music, this consciousness in turn
follows the biosemiotic principle by which motives communicate with each other
according to a certain “inner” score. One may presume that the inner score is
different in each work. But one may also claim that in certain respects it is always
the same, as Schenker’s, Kurth’s, and Asafiev’s theories assert. Nevertheless, the
idea of an organic composition cannot be limited to a single, universal principle.
For nature’s scope of variation is unlimited, and thus always capable of producing
new types of organisms. Basically, however, the organism always decides upon its
own Umwelt or relationship to external reality. It is the organism that determines
which signals, style influences, motivic borrowings, and so on that it accepts from
the style of the time, from other composers, and even from itself. An instance of
the latter occurs in Sibelius’s moving materials from the Sixth Symphony to the
Fifth. That is to say, the Ich-ton of the Fifth Symphony, its “inner score”, allowed
certain signs to be shifted into its own “cells”, while rejecting others.
We can now return to the thesis presented above, namely, that Sibelius’s mu-
sic is organic and Mahler’s is not. The Ich-ton of Sibelius’s symphonies determines
precisely which musical cells are accepted and adopted into the inner network
of musical communication, that is to say, into the “community” of its musical
actors. In contrast, Mahler chooses very heterogeneous elements; his music’s Ich-
ton is far more fragmentary than that of Sibelius – it is contradictory and “mod-
ern”. Mahler’s symphonies encompass everything, but do so without the afore-
mentioned selection criteria of the Umwelt. His musical actors do not communic-
ate with each other as intensively or as intimately as they do in Sibelius. Rather,
Mahler’s work is ruled by “unit forms” ’, by topics and musical cells articulated by
social conventions. His music adapts itself more to structures of communication
than to those of signification.
One of the best-known recent interpretations of Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony
is the one by James Hepokoski (1993). His central concept for explaining formal
issues in Sibelius is the so-called rotation principle. Hepokoski denies the relev-
ance of traditional Formenlehre for Sibelius, since according to the composer his
musical form grew from the inside out, as he said often to his secretary Santeri
Levas (see Hepokoski 1993: 22). Hepokoski says that it is typical of Sibelius to use
repetition to erase, so to speak, the linear time of a work; he does so by letting
certain elements, motives, and entire sections recur cyclically again and again.
Hepokoski thinks this phenomenon stems from the Finnish Kalevala recitation,
as shown in the song Illalle (op. 17 no. 6). There a figure of 11 notes is repeated
16 times! Hepokoski notices that the rotation idea occurs not only Russian but
also in Austrian-German music, such as that of Schubert and Bruckner. In Si-
belius, however, the rotation is a process rather than an architectonic scheme or
mould. In this sense, such rotation suits well as an example of organic music.
In Hepokoski’s view, the rotational process starts with some musical statement
that serves as the point of reference for later statements. The statement can be
extensive at first hearing, containing various themes, motives, and figures which
can even differ one from the other. It returns later, when it has been transformed
a little, and it can return many times, such that it is heard each time more intens-
ively.
In Hepokoski’s theory the rotation principle in Sibelius is connected with the
idea of a telos, that is, with the final climax of a piece as the goal of the musical
process. Together, these two principles – rotation and telos – help explain the
form of entire works, such as the Fifth Symphony. From the perspective of or-
ganicism, Hepokoski’s notion of rotation provides the inner iconicity of a work,
and telos serves as the extreme point of maturation of the work, which, so to say,
pulls earlier rotations toward itself, causing them to grow and transform. From the
beginning, inner processes among musical signs aim for the climax. This view dif-
fers from Salmenhaara’s, which stresses the self-reflexivity of the transformation
process. Hepokoski emphasizes more the syntagmatic nature of music, whereas
Salmenhaara adheres to the paradigmatic one. From a biosemiotic perspective,
we can consider the telos of a symphony to be the same as its Ich-ton, which is
revealed only at the end. On this view, Sibelius’s symphonies constitute symbolic
portrayals of his “wonderful ego”.
13.B.3 Organic narrativity
The present study would not be complete with our relating the organic principle to
an important species of musical semiosis: narrativity. Narratologists succeeded in
demonstrating that very different texts – texts extremely varied as to their material
and to their external shapes – can be based on just a few narrative categories. Here
we speak of the narrativity of a symphony on the level of form, not of aesthetic
style. If Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony and Heldenleben are narrative on the
level of verbal reception, in Sibelius narrativity should be understood in a deeper
sense, as a property of dynamic formal processes.
If music is organic, can it also be narrative? Is narrativity like language, rhet-
oric, grammar and other categories that separate the listener from the world of
musical gestalts? Not at all – insofar as narrativity is understood in a broader
sense, as conceptualized in Greimas’s school. Narrativity is a way of shaping the
world in its temporal, spatial, and actorial course. Does “organic” narrativity thus
mean that the text is articulated according to some primal narration? that it is a
story of man’s conjunction with or disjunction from nature and cosmos? Narrativ-
ity covers many of the sign processes discussed above. Further, one might assume
that, in certain forms, it is precisely the way in which man’s Dasein imitates the
cosmic principles of nature. Narration can of course focus on description and
classification of the inner events of Dasein, but it can also be the way in which
the world of transcendental ideas is concretized in temporality. As a temporal art,
music is thus one of the best means of narrativizing transcendental ideas.
In closing, I return to Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, in order to make a narra-
tological interpretation that relates to the aforementioned ideas of nature, the
project of the “modern”, and metaphors of organism. My interpretation stems
from two listenings during which this narrative program was revealed to me. The
first listening occurred at the beginning of the 1960s, probably at a concert given
by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra at the Solemnity Hall of the University
of Helsinki, under the direction of Jussi Jalas. Since I was a teenager at that time,
my seat was quite near the front of the hall, on the right side, from which one could
clearly see the conductor. Nothing remains in my mind from that performance ex-
cept its climax: the Largamente assai at the end of the finale, the unison orchestral
tutti on the note C. There the dissonance is at its sharpest, and the listener does
not at all know where this tragic development might lead – until soon after it the
whole symphony cadences and turns toward the tonic E flat major as its final telos
(compared to which the E flat tonic at the end of the first movement was not a
real return to home). At this crucial juncture, on the C and its leading tone, the
conductor raised himself to full height and trembled all over (something Sibelius
is also said to have done; see Tawaststjerna 1978: 147). This corporeal sign has
remained in my memory.
The second listening was in the summer of 1998 when Esapekka Salonen,
visiting conductor of the Mariinsky Theater Summer Festival in Mikkeli, included
on his program the Fifth Symphony of Sibelius. By then I was already familiar
with the piano score, which naturally deepened the experience. At that hearing,
the true climax and solution of the work revealed itself as the events in score letter
N, Un pochettino largamento, the E flat minor section. The melody of that section
is the first full theme-actor in the entire symphony, which is articulated in the
manner of a lied, in periodic form and with a “normal” cadence. This theme is thus
experienced as representing a kind of human subject that shows itself against
the backdrop of “cosmic” views. As noted earlier, Sibelius’s music often gives
the impression of a landscape without any human protagonist. Here the subject
enters the stage, and it is the suffering, sentimental subject of Schiller (1978), a
subject disjuncted from its object and given to resignation. It is a Tchaikovskian,
resigned self, whose story has come to an end and whose speech is finally cut
off (N: 16), as if by the dysphoric weight of its emotion. It is a subject who is
detached from the cosmos, and yet it is basically the same subject which we heard
as early as in the previous movement, where it hovered restlessly, not knowing its
fate. Tawaststjerna reduces it to another important theme grouping of the Fifth
Symphony, the step-motive, which was one of the very first ideas in the work.
Certainly these motives were earlier fragments of a subject, but here in the Un
pochettino largamento section the subject steps into the foreground as a complete
person who has suffered a catastrophe. At the end of the theme, the E flat minor
turns into major, which is like a deus ex machina solution to the threat of im-
pending tragedy. The subject is rescued, so to speak, by being shifted to another
cosmic level of nature. The latter is represented by the well-known swing-motive,
which according to Tawaststjerna belongs to the other central motivic group of
the symphony. The association of this motive with nature is obvious already from
the viewpoint of poiesis, as evidenced by Sibelius’s diaries, in which he mentions

swans in reference to this theme.
This theme thus symbolizes nature and cosmos for the whole symphony. But
just when we have reached it, as a safe haven and salvation of the individual
from tragedy, even this level falls into a crisis. The swing-theme is led into deeper
and deeper dissonance via modulations that move still further away from the
tonic. The theme-actor whose fate we were following was thus not safe, as we
had thought. What is now involved is nature’s crisis, Sibelius’s Götterdämmerung.
The crisis culminates in the above-mentioned C, after which the music leads to
a cadence on the tonic of E-flat major with many ensuing chromatic tones – an
answer to the gap opened by the “bucolic” motive of the first movement. Therefore
the answer which has been kept secret is finally revealed in full light. Perhaps
representing a kind of rescue on the cosmic level, it is impossible describe this
moment verbally. In any case, there remains yet one more surprise: six sforzando
chords punctuate the ending, played by tutti orchestra. These resume the problem
of the horn signal and its solution, but the effect is very surprising, lightening,
consciously alienating – all is only play; we can sigh in relief.
Yet this description holds true only for the final version of the symphony. In
the earlier version, from 1915, the subject-theme appears to the very end as de-
tached, disjuncted from the cosmos, as an individual and alienated theme-actor
who does not unite with the cosmic order. As a symbol of the modernist project,
it constantly evokes its existence by means of dissonances. Its relation to the am-
biguous Neapolitan motive is quite clear as early as in section D of the Finale,
when the swing-theme bursts out and the subject-theme is heard as a savage, illo-
gical, and dissonant counterpart, such as one hears in the riotous simultaneities
of Charles Ives. There the subject-theme obviously belongs to the same family as
the descending and ascending leaps of fourths in the Neapolitan motive in the
first movement (see B: 5–6). The impression is even one of bitonality, and was
noticed at the first performance of the work. Otto Kotilainen spoke of a “strange,
piercing signal which . . . gives an upsetting impression.” The effect is completely
modernistic, and it also represents, in the philosophical sense, the subject of the
project of the “modern”, which is alienated by its separation from the cosmos.
The gradual unfolding of the subject-theme in its various “rotations” is indeed
one of the most characteristic events of the whole symphony. It is the central
narrative moment. In the 1915 version, the theme never seems to find its proper
isotopy, its own Umwelt. Its difference remains until the end, when it returns in the
Un pochettino largamente, and even there it is still the tragic and isolated theme
actor, who is destined for destruction. But in the Un pochettino largamente section
it takes on an extremely appealing sensual shape, as if a last gesture is made to
serve as the counterpart of the swing-theme. This is related to the idea of the return
to the cosmos. In the 1915 version, this subject-theme does not merge with nature
in the end, as it does in the final version of symphony. It remains as the pedal
point of the strings, to remind one of its existence – even the six chords at the
end are heard against this pedal. In the philosophical-semiotic sense, the 1915
version keeps to the modernist project in its narrative program. The separation
of the subject from cosmos holds to the very end. By contrast, in the version of
1919 the subject fuses with the cosmic level. Thus, even in the narrative sense,
this symphony represents the “organic” in music.
Chapter 14
Finland in the eyes of a semiotician
‘. . . he was one of those slow Finns . . . ’
(Thomas A. Sebeok)
14.1 Introduction
For a semiotician the analysis of a national culture is a paradoxical task, espe-

cially when he examines the culture to which he himself belongs. The cultural
analysis of the French semioticians has been, in general, iconoclastic, breaking
myths and uncovering their mechanisms; the assumption was that in the back-
ground there was a kind of ideological anti-subject who exploited the semiotic
processes of a culture for doubtful aims. Yet one might also imagine a kind of
‘positive’ semiology, which does not break myths, but instead supports the efforts
of a given community to maintain its particular universe of signs. The community
can benefit from such knowledge, especially in a situation where it is subject to
some outer or inner threat.
A culture can be said to be under a ‘threat’ in many senses: it may be a so-
called primitive, traditional culture which is about to disappear (i.e., ‘the last
remnants of a certain cultural form’); or it may be some national creature under
the pressure of unification with some other, greater culture; it may even be some
national culture subordinated to the subversive influence of a stronger culture.
Umberto Eco has spoken of a semiotic guerrilla war, waged not against the sender
of a message but during the reception process, in the interpretation of a message
(Eco 1985: 151–160). He is referring to the messages streaming from the mass me-
dia: no semiotician can prevent them as such, but one can learn to read these
messages and texts in such a way that their influence is reduced.
As to the Finnish culture, a semiotic analysis is not difficult insofar as the
object of analysis is easily defined. In the theories of Yuri Lotman the crucial as-
pect is the way in which some culture distinguishes itself from other cultures or
‘semiospheres’:
The basic concept of the semiosphere is precisely that of a ‘limit’ . . . . The closed nature of
semiosphere becomes manifest in the fact that it is not capable of communication with
extrasemiotical or non semiotical texts. In order to become something real for some se-
miosphere, they have to be translated into some of its inner languages – i.e. culture has
to ‘semiotize’ these extrasemiotic facts.
(Uspenskij et al. 1973: 3)
This is precisely the case with the Finnish culture: the limits of this culture, the
Finnish semiosphere, are very clear, since they coincide with so many other su-
perimposed limits: geographic isolation, language, human types, manners, tra-
ditions in a word, the unified Finnish culture. The authors of a cultural history of
Finland, Päiviö Tommila, Aimo Reitala, and Veikko Kallio, say:
Finland has very seldom been a country which has expanded its culture elsewhere. Cultural
innovations have, in general, come here from other countries. One of the central tasks of
Finnish cultural history, therefore-particularly as to such periods of great change like the
nineteenth century – is to clarify how and through which channels various cultural phe-
nomena have come into Finland. How they have been received, how they have spread, how
they have become integrated into the already existing tradition of the country and how the
new cultural stratum thus created has again met the waves of subsequent new influences.
(1980: 5)
In the semiotic sense, then, Finland has been a field for the reception of various
influences and messages, and it has also become accustomed to this role as a
receiver in intercultural communication. An interesting thread thus runs through-
out our cultural history – the various ways in which the Finnish culture has been
able to transform these external impacts into Finnish (i.e., to ‘semiotize’ them).
If we follow the ideas of Lotman’s school, somewhere in every culture a kind
of generator of structurality looms, which yields new structures. These structures,
as we know, make possible the social life of man, in the same sense that the bio-
sphere makes human biological life possible. In Lotman’s theory this ‘generator of
structures’ (or sampo, ‘mill’, to use a word from Finnish mythology) is easily iden-
tified as a kind or organism: ‘The semiosphere is a semiotic personality’ (Tarasti
1988: 794). Furthermore, as Lotman states, the limits of this semiotic personality
do not necessarily overlap with the physical boundaries of a human figure, but the
same ‘person’ may include a whole family, with its servants (as an example one
may mention lvan the Terrible, who usually had a disobedient boyar killed with
all his relatives). We are thus rather close here to the romantic view of culture as
a kind of organism (Tarasti 1988: 794).
We do not need to search so far afield for illustrations. In his essay ‘Nationality
and the ideal of a nationality’ Johan Vilhelm Snellman writes:
Nationality is the social personality of a nation, which means that the social life in all its
forms has to be original, to distinguish itself from the originalities of all other nations, in
order to deserve the name of a nation.
(1928: 294)
Snellman’s idea may be linked to Lotman via Hegel and speculative German philo-
sophy. Nevertheless, a national culture is, of course, by no means an already given
and unproblematic entity for a semiotician. In the background of a national cul-
308 | 14 Finland in the eyes of a semiotician
ture, there indeed lies a certain physical unity, a spatially, temporally and act-
orially definable landscape, climate, race, etc. – all the various factors whereby
scholars have attempted an interpretation of a national culture. But what is essen-
tial is that a national culture starts to search for these signs and emphasize them
in an entirely different manner. For a semiotician, culture is always something
arbitrary, artificial, conventional. When a semiotician realizes how national signs
have been made, he no longer speaks in terms of a national ideology. In this light,
too, Snellman’s ideas prove to be amazingly semiotic: he speaks about an indi-
vidual in whose knowing and willing (the Greimassian modalities) the language
and national character also have their own spiritual meaning:
These are not such because an individual conceives them to be free in a spiritual sense [read
in semiotic metalanguage: to be arbitrary] and as such he may use them for his deliberate
purposes. For him they do not mean the same as they meant for his fathers. He knows
that the distinction has been created spiritually [read: arbitrarily]. One might therefore say:
nationality is the social life of a nation, insofar as by sociality one understands the unity of
knowing and willing of all particular individuals and different generations of a nation.
(Snellman 1928: 294)
We can make Snellman’s text sound very semiotic by simply interpreting the
concept of ‘spirit’ in a Greimassian way as the modal dimension of man – i.e., as
the attitude of a subject toward an object, which can be seen as the indispensable
catalyzing force of any semiotic process (also in the theory of Charles Morris and
George Herbert Mead; see for example Mead 1938). Introducing Greimas into this
network of interpretation is totally justified, more particularly, since his thinking
also has its roots – in spite of its Cartesian appearance – in the traditions of
Eastern European thought.
In analyzing national culture semiotically, we should not begin simply by
making a list of texts representing it – in our case, Kalevala, the essays of Snell-
man¹; Maamme kirja (The Book of Our Country) by Topelius²; paintings by Gallen-
Kallela³; an opera by Sallinen⁴ or Kokkonen⁵; a Sibelius symphony⁶; the novel
Seven Brothers by Kivi⁷; a film based on it by Jouko Turkka⁸; a building by Aalto⁹;
1 Johan Vilhelm Snellman (1806–1881), a philosopher, statesman, and awakener of national

spirit in Finland. Snellman based his activities on Hegel’s philosophy, which had been taught at
the University of Helsinki since the early 1820s earlier than elsewhere in Scandinavia. He studied
in Germany and published there an essay titled Versuch einer spekulativen Entwicklung der Idee
der Persönlichkeit (see Snellman 1982). Upon his return to Finland he worked as a journalist,
sharply criticizing the cultural and political situation of Finland at the time. For this reason he
could not get a chair in philosophy until 1856 at the University of Helsinki, which was under the
control of Russian authorities. Subsequently Snellman gave up his university position and was
nominated as a senator.
a ‘Finnish design’ bottle, etc. and then continue by analyzing them with all those
subtle methods developed by both the European and the American branches of
semiotics. This would not display the functioning of these texts as a part of a
national culture. The essential aspect of a cultural semiotics is not the structure of
a sign, but the relation of a sign to its semiotical background, to the semiosphere
where it lives and exists. Lotman leaves aside all the disputes about whether signs
should be studied with Peircean triadic categories or with the Greimassian gen-
2 Zachris Topelius (1818–1898), one of the national poets and writers of Finland. Topelius’s best-
known novel was Stories of an Army Surgeon (published as several volumes in 1851–1866), in
which he depicted the often forgotten role of the Finns in the history of Sweden. Topelius was
also a journalist and wrote many books for children. Particularly, his Book of Our Country (in
Swedish, Boken om vårt land; in Finnish, Maamme kirja, 1875), has been much used in schools
well into this century.
3 Akseli Gallen-Kallela (1856–1931), a painter, one of the best representatives of the Finnish
National Romanticism in the arts. Gallen-Kallela studied in Paris at Academie Julian, where he
learned a naturalist technique; however, his own style developed only after he became inspired
by Kalevala, the collection of Finnish poetry published and edited by Elias Lönnrot as early
as 1835. Gallen-Kallela’s large canvas paintings on such themes as Kullervo, Lemminkäinen,
Väinämöinen, and Joukahainen, all heroes from Kalevala, belong to the most central ‘visual texts’
of the Finnish national culture.
4 Aulis Sallinen (born in 1935), a composer, particularly appreciated for his operas, whose lib-
rettos are often taken from Finnish literature. The Red Line was performed by the Metropolitan
Opera of New York in 1979, and The King Leaves for France in the opera of Santa Fe in 1986.
5 Joonas Kokkonen (1921–1996), a composer and academician, one of the most distinguished
Finnish composers of our time. Kokkonen continued the Sibelian symphonic tradition, but his
vocal works, like his opera The Last Temptations (performed by the Metropolitan Opera in 1979)
and his Requiem, are also internationally acclaimed pieces.
6 Jean Sibelius (1865–1957), the greatest Finnish composer. Sibelius studied in Berlin and Vienna
and by the turn of the century had become one of the creators of the national-romantic style in
Finnish music. His first symphonic poems were written on subjects taken from the Kalevala (like
En Saga, The Swan of Tuonela, etc.) or related to Finnish patriotism (Finlandia); he later became,
particularly through his series of seven symphonies, a reformer of the symphonic form in general
in the music of our century.
7 Aleksis Kivi (1834–1872), a writer and poet, the most remarkable original talent of Finnish
literature and the greatest humorist of Nordic literature. Kivi’s main work was his novel The
Seven Brothers, which portrayed the life of Finnish peasants with a realism that was not accepted
by cultural authorities of his time. Kivi died forgotten, mentally ill, and in extreme poverty; his
greatness was discovered and officially recognized only years after his death.
8 Jouko Turkka (born in 1942), a reformer of Finnish theater through his highly original and often
extravagant stagings and education of actors.
9 Alvar Aalto (1898–1976), the best-known Finnish architect, with an international reputation.
Aalto created a form language of his own and realized it with his original style from monumental
buildings to small, functionally designed objects.
erative model. he says that no single and functionally discrete sign system can
function in isolation from other systems of signs. It only functions as part of a
semiotic continuum, which is full of heterogeneous formations on different levels
(Uspenskij et al. 1973: 4).
Let us take one concrete example: in the novel by Antti Jalava entitled The
Asphalt Flower (1981), the conflict between Finnish and Swedish culture is depic-
ted from the viewpoint of a young immigrant boy in Sweden. The events take place
in the recent past. The Swedish classmates of the Finnish boy tease him, remind-
ing him that he cannot pronounce two successive b’s. In a Swedish lesson they
ask him to utter the word ‘abborre’, which he can only pronounce with two voice-
less consonants as ‘apporre’. In structural linguistic terms, what is involved is the
simple distinction between p and b, between the voiced and voiceless consonant
in Swedish, a distinction which Finnish lacks. However, in this semiotic situation,
the word not only serves as a linguistic unit; it expressly becomes an index of cul-
tural boundary as well. The differences between two cultures are manifest therein,
the distinction between culture and non-culture.
But how then is a national semiosphere created? How can it be analyzed if
not through texts representing it? If we ask anyone what is typically Finnish, the
answers invariably refer precisely to representative texts: a Sibelius symphony, a
painting by Järnefelt¹⁰, the voice of Aino Ackte¹¹ or Martti Talvela¹², etc. Yet these
examples transmit a message about the Finnish identity only against a certain
background. The famous violin teacher Joseph Gingold, who has taught many
generations of violinists the Sibelius concerto, said that only after having come to
Finland and seen his home Ainola in the darkness of a December morning did he
understand what this work was all about. Only as part of the semiotic continuum
can products of a national culture please and charm with their original composi-
tion, structure, and other properties, and in this way become well-known parts
of the world culture, the ‘universal civilization’, to use Snellman’s expression.
Naturally, each text also has its own autonomous hierarchy; it is in this sense,
10 Eero Järnefelt (1863–1937), a Finnish painter, a contemporary of Gallen-Kallela and Sibelius,

who with his lyrical style captured the beauty of the Finnish landscape.
11 Aino Ackté (1876–1944), a Finnish soprano who had one of the most brilliant careers in the
Finnish performing arts. Ackté drew great attention singing principal roles at the Grand Opera
of Paris in 1879–1903; subsequently she also sang in the Metropolitan Opera of New York in
1904–1906, and later founded in Finland the well-known opera festival at the medieval castle
of Savonlinna as early as in the 1910s.
12 Martti Talvela (1935–1989), a Finnish bass singer, one of the greatest bass voices of our century.
Particularly appreciated are his interpretations and recordings of the role of Boris in Mussorgsky’s
opera.
for example, that Sibelius is listened to in the United States as part of the ‘tono-
sphere’ experienced by Americans or that a Finnish novel can be read as part of
an international ‘literosphere’, etc.
It is precisely imitative, mimetic behavior that forms a model upon which the
power of a national culture is based. National cultures are primarily interested in
maintaining themselves as they have always been. Therefore, they have to create
mechanisms of behavior which guarantee that certain attitudes, evaluations, etc.
are conserved as long as possible, or as is said in the jargon of national ideologies,
from one generation to another. This is why the basic category of every national
culture is iconicity, according to which a sign is similar to its object.
Discussions about national culture often allude particularly to national sym-
bols. Nevertheless, this is only one side or dimension of the matter: the symbols
must also have the power to produce a certain kind of behavior. In other words,
they must exercise indexical power upon the people for whom the symbols are
created. They should reflect as similar something which characterizes the observ-
able reality of the national culture in question. On the other hand, these national
icons continuously have to yield other iconic or similar signs, in order that the
entire culture should preserve its original national nature.
Hence, an artist may create a text or symbol which is originally not intended at
all to serve as a national ‘icon’. lt is produced for merely aesthetic or other reasons,
but then it gradually for entirely external reasons-assumes an iconic character in
the culture. For example, if in a documentary film Jean Sibelius wanders in the
forests of Järvenpää dressed in a fine suit, according to the bourgeois habits of the
turn of the century, this is not yet iconic behavior as such. But if fifty years later our
academician Joonas Kokkonen or composer Paavo Heininen¹³ appeared there in
a tie and dark suit, this could be said to be iconic behavior, since what is involved
would perhaps be an imitation of the original hero. By so doing they would show
that they occupy the same mythical role in the national musical culture. Sibelius
has become a role in the national culture, and years later one can still ask, ‘Who
is now the Sibelius of Finland?’ – just as at the end of the nineteenth century it
was asked in Helsinki, when the great national composer Friedrich Pacius¹⁴ had
returned to his native Germany, who would now become ‘our Pacius’.
It is precisely this kind of conduct which is iconic in the true sense of the word.
13 Paavo Heininen (born in 1938), a composer, one of the leading avant-gardists of Finnish con-
temporary music.
14 Friedrich Pacius (1809–1891), a German composer, who became, after having settled in Hel-
sinki as a music teacher at the University, the founder of musical life in the capital. His musical
interpretation of the poem of J. L. Runeberg was accepted as the national anthem of Finland.
Another example is Vänrikki Stoolin tarinat (The Tales of Ensign Stål), a collec-
tion of poems by Johan Ludvig Runeberg¹⁵ depicting the heroes of the war of 1809;
this is a literary work which was undoubtedly intended right from its publication
to establish national and iconic hero figures. Its introduction includes a narrative
situation in which a younger person is told about the heroes of the war, so that he
will identify with them and imitate them later himself. One has to identify with
symbols of national culture (paintings, poems, dramas, novels, films); otherwise
they lose their efficiency and ability to function in a national culture. And identi-
fication is quite literally, according to its name, an iconic sign category.
There are thus two phases in national iconicity: first, the creation of the sign
itself; and then its endowment with iconic relations in order to facilitate the iden-
tification of the receiver. In art music this means that one has to use folk music
themes to make it sound ‘national’. ln the same way, in literary texts, fictional
characters have to use expressions from the spoken language; poems must con-
tain descriptions which in some indefinite way are iconic for example, in arousing
associations and images similar to those of daily life.
In some cases the iconicity in poetry is multiple, as in the famous poem by
Ilmari Kianto: ‘Kuulkaa korpien kuiskintaa, jylhien järvien loiskintaa’ (Listen to the
whisper of forests, the waves of austere lakes)¹⁶. The images and symbols refer to
a certain landscape which can be found in Kainuu (Northern Finland), yet they
are also presented in the form of rhyme and alliteration, which represent icon-
icity on the level of the linguistic sign itself. Novels, moreover, may contain iconic
imitations of some other art form. If one were to write for the Finnish culture a
work equivalent to Foucault’s The Order of Things, dealing with the epistemes of
the entire national culture, one might start rather like Foucault does, with his
analysis of the painting L’infanta by Vélasquez (Foucault 1970: 3–16), which is
based upon the representation of representation. One might start from the first
chapter of the novel Tuomas Vitikka by Eino Leino¹⁷ and its static iconographic
portrayal symbolizing the Finnish culture at the turn of the century (Leino 1928:
91–98). Annamari Sarajas (1962) has drawn attention to this novel with her ana-
15 Johan Ludvig Runeberg (1804–1877), one of Finland’s national poets, who wrote in Swedish.
His collections of poems depicting Finnish heroes of the war of 1809 (The Stories of Ensign Stål,
in Swedish Fänrik Ståls sägner, in 1848 and 1860) have had a lasting impact on Finnish nation-
alism until our time. The first poem of these collections, ‘Maamme’ (Our Country), with music
composed by Friedrich Pacius, became the national anthem of Finland.
16 Ilmari Kianto (1874–1965), a writer with a strongly naturalist style, depicted life in Kainuu,
Northern Finland.
17 Eino Leino (1878–1926), a poet whose major contribution concerned the national romantic
and, later, symbolist movements of the arts in Finland.
lysis of Eino Leino’s ironic, distanced attitude to the Finnish national culture and
its exaggerated national-mindedness.
The description represents a kind of iconicity in many respects. What is de-
picted there is an idyllic Finnish ‘Stilleben’ from the nineteenth century with a
group of people gathered in the courtyard of a manor. The portrayal is done in a
mildly ironic tone, person by person, in such a way that each type corresponds
to a certain class and figure in Finnish society and culture. At the end a German
professor is introduced: he has come to the country in order to learn about the
indigenous folk-life; his name is Dr. Friedrich Gottlob Meyer, Extraordinary Pro-
fessor of Aesthetics and Art History from the University of Heidelberg. He has
taken his place to paint the static scene.
At the same time, the viewpoint of the narrator is, as it were, shifted to become
that of the foreigner, and it is given to be understood that the scene in the novel
has been described as it appears in the canvas painted by Meyer. But when this
person is again described, one notices how the whole first chapter of the novel
is in fact a kind of ‘nostalgic’, ‘iconic’ portrayal, like a family photograph. The
extremely static quality of the scene serves at the same time as a symbol of the
stability of the Finnish culture of the period. The rich use of alliteration in the text
serves as an internal icon, i.e., as the principle of repetition, which again provides
the impression of some kind of stylized Kalevala-like prose, although this device is
used very deliberately in order to create comic effects. The principle of repetition
in the prose functions as a means of estrangement.
The development of a national culture thus contains two ‘semiotic’ phases:
(A) In the first phase, icons of national identity in various arts and representative
texts in a broader sense are created or invented: what is involved here is the search
for an icon to fit an already completed conceptual and abstract system of thought
in order to concretize it, plus the fact that the artists, scientists, and distinguished
people of a nation themselves produce these ‘icons’ of national identity, while the
receivers only subsequently identify with them. (B) In the second phase, one starts
to produce new national icons using the ready-made icons of the ‘first phase’.
This is the typical phase of folklorism, where the national character is no longer
created, but preserved. How soon a national culture crystallizes or stagnates into
this second phase depends on many historical and extrasemiotic factors. Never-
theless, this second phase is characterized expressly by the schematization of the
national identity, stability, and a corresponding canon of behavior, a defensive
attitude, the rejection of external influences, the jealous conservation of the ori-
ginal. (Vesa Kurkela has discussed the problem in his study of musical folklorism
[1989].)
On the other hand, iconic signs of a culture are not efficient unless they are
provided with indexical linkage (i.e., a reference to corresponding semiotic activ-
ity or behavior). Usually national icons are combined with some implicit or expli-
cit verbal index: do as the sign advises, imitate it, keep yourself within its lim-
its! Biographies are one constant and central textual genre of a national culture.
They are produced precisely in order to create models for behavior which would
guarantee the continuity of the national culture and support its existence for the
members of the same community. For outside readers such biographies naturally
appear in quite a different light. For example, some of Jean Sibelius’ utterances,
which his biographer Erik Tawaststjerna (1976) quotes from the composer’s diar-
ies (‘Do not give up the pathos of the life!’ or ‘You wonderful ego . . . ’ etc.), have
become almost proverbs in Finnish culture. But when these parts of the biography
are read as English translations by foreigners, they appear differently.
Maamme kirja (The Book of Our Country) by Zachris Topelius, a very central
‘national’ text, also contains biographies meant as ideals for the young, with built-
in indexical references to corresponding semiotic conduct. For example, it is said
of Matias Aleksanteri Castrén¹⁸: ‘he has revealed to us the cradle of the Finnish
nation. Others have then, animated by his example, continued his work . . . . This
is why no Finnish man or woman can forget this faithful man, who suffered so
much and worked so hard for our nation and for mankind’ (Topelius 1981: 106).
However, the icons of a national culture do not emerge from nothing, but
spring forth from the particular semiosphere formed by the particular nation and
culture. Semioticians of culture strongly emphasize that the signs and texts of a
national culture cannot function at all without the existence of a semiosphere.
This is well illustrated by the collecting of folklore instigated by the national cul-
tural ideology, culminating for instance in the immense archives of the Finnish
Literary Society. At least as regards the music collection, it is sad to think how
much work has gone into saving some tunes from distant Siberia; now that they
are conserved, modern scholars are less interested in studying them than in the
rock and popular music of contemporary Finland, which is considered a more
important subject. Thus, changes in the Finnish semiosphere also alter attitudes
toward texts which were earlier held to be central to the culture: these may be
relegated to the category of almost forgotten texts, or swept away altogether from
the collective memory of the culture.
How then can one analyze the semiosphere? One student of Lotman, Igor
Czernov, has claimed (1986) that the semiosphere is not so useful as a concept
since it cannot be properly observed. A firmly empirically minded Anglo-Saxon
18 Matias Aleksanteri Castrén (1813–1852), a linguist and folklorist. His journeys among the
Fenno-Ugric peoples living in Siberia led him to publish a number of studies dealing with the
languages and cultures of these peoples.
anthropologist would hardly accept such a notion. But let us remember the motto
of empiricism: try to make everything measurable.
How can we make the concept of the ‘semiosphere’ measurable? Without
doubt, what is involved here is precisely what the Hegelian Snellman would call
the spirit of a nation, or what the romanticist Topelius would call the national
character. Topelius writes:
If we travel abroad and meet there our compatriots from different parts of our country, then
we notice that they are in many regards very similar . . . . Such a mutual similarity or property
of a nation (a national character) can be more easily felt than explained.
(1981: 124)
In fact, in the field of semiotics, and particularly in the Parisian school of semi-
otics, even such vague objects as emotions (passions) are, as we know, analyzed
semiotically (see for example Greimas 1983: 213–246). The idea is that the emo-
tions can be reduced to some few modalities, which are very restricted in number
(i.e., seven altogether): being, doing, willing, knowing, being obliged to do some-
thing, being able to do something, and believing. For each emotion we can write
a strictly formal scheme, providing it with a semiotic definition.
When Topelius portrays the qualities which give rise to the Finnish semio-
sphere, he lists the following: ‘The Finns are dominated by a deep and true fear
of God’ (= a positive articulation of the modality of believing); ‘it (the nation) is
diligent and persistent’ (= modalities of willing, doing and being able to do); ‘it
is hardened and strong’ (= the modality of being able to do); ‘it is patient, un-
self-demanding and vital’ (= several modalities in different constellations); ‘it is
a peaceful nation’ (= the modality of being dominates that of doing); ‘it is also
courageous and capable of fighting in a war’ (= modalities of doing and being
able to do); ‘even when conquered and subordinated it has always maintained its
own way of living and thinking: it is therefore an extremely durable and obstinate
nation’ (= a complex combination of the modalities of being able to do and doing
something); ‘once it has placed itself under a government, a foreign one or one
of its own, it has never rebelled against it therefore, it is faithful’ (= modality of
being obliged to do); ‘it has often neglected the use of its rights and power when
there has been a need of them: consequently, it is a slow and hesitant nation’
(= modalities of willing to be [vouloir être] and willing to not-do [vouloir non-faire]);
‘but under the violence and subordination it has not accepted to remain under the
yoke of the oppressor – it is a nation which loves freedom (willing to not-be [vouloir
non-être] and willing to do [vouloir faire]); ‘and finally it has in its lonely forests,
far from the centres of the civilized world, raised itself into enlightenment – it is
thus a nation which desires knowledge and culture’ (= modalities of willing and
knowing [vouloir savoir]) (Topelius 1981: 126).
In fact, Topelius’s generative model of the Finnish identity is an unusually

consistent narrative of the Finnish semiosphere. After this general depiction of
the semiosphere, he puts these modalities of the Finnish character into a narrative
whose main actor is the farm-hand Matti.
Through the portrayal of this ‘one’ actor – which in the text has two ‘senders’,
the Finnish people and God himself (as the hidden actor revealed only at the end
of the text) – he makes the abstract semiosphere concrete and clearly observable
and measurable as a certain behavior which is also provided with a strongly pos-
itive mythic category – i.e., its euphoric articulation (even in the description of
the weaknesses of Matti, in such a way that the negative sides of his character are
made comical). In other words, as regards their semic content these two consec-
utive sections of the text are identical, but they have been narrativized in differ-
ent ways. All this takes place in chapters 70 ‘The Finnish people’ and 71 ‘Matti’
(Topelius 1981: 124–129). Precisely because of its euphoric evaluation and con-
creteness, the latter text represents something with which the reader is more apt to
identify -and it is just this identification that constitutes the indispensable precon-
dition for the functioning of the national icons. Therefore, the latter text is by its
nature more indexical than the former. It encourages iconic or imitative behavior,
or at least allows the reader to recognize the modalities in question within himself,
to experience them as acceptable, and in this way to provide the more extensive
actor, ‘the Finnish people’, with a positive, euphoric articulation. It is by and large
this kind of semiotic mechanism that we find in Topelius’s text.
To conclude, one might mention two typical features of the Finnish semio-
sphere. First, we have to notice the poverty of the Finnish universe of signs. In the
Finnish environment there are rather few distinct signs for the receiver to decode –
compared to many other cultures. Other cultures are accustomed to receiving a
constant stream of messages from all sides, messages which may even be mutu-
ally contradictory. They have thus learned to understand a varied and polyvalent
universe of signs, and have been able to adopt the corresponding semiotic conduct
whereby one can survive in such a universe. Since the Finnish universe of signs
is limited, and more particularly, since the signs tend to be interpreted with the
same, overlapping codes (this is precisely the so-called unified national culture),
one experiences all the foreign signs which penetrate into this static semiosphere
as somewhat threatening.
From this, another trait can be inferred: there are not many elements bor-
rowed from other cultures in the Finnish context. If one thinks of artists who have
tried to become familiar with foreign cultures and ‘translate’ foreign texts into
their ‘own’ language, it becomes evident that their efforts have usually remained
peripheral to their own culture. One may think, for example, of Gallen-Kallela’s
African period, the rejection of international modernist movements in different
phases of Finnish musical life, etc. An entirely different chapter is formed by

those artists, scientists, and thinkers who have felt so strange in the Finnish
semiosphere that they have considered it wiser to move permanently abroad
(A. I. Arwidsson, Armas Launis, etc.). They form an interesting case in the history
of the Finnish semiosphere.
In fact, artistic texts which represent a negation of the prevalent semiosphere,
a kind of antithesis to it (for example in the form of a cultural criticism), remain in
the history or the collective memory of the Finnish nation. But texts which are
wholly messages from ‘elsewhere’, whose codes are too far removed from this
semiosphere, are neglected and have no influence. They represent texts which
the culture cannot translate.
On the other hand, semiotic texts and ways of behavior coming from outside
which are perceived as threats to the dominant semiosphere become objects of
a particular kind of resistance. Then the rejection and resisting usually form a
particular semiotic program of behavior in the culture in question. What was res-
isted in the nineteenth century and again in the 1920s was the Swedish culture
and language; at the end of the nineteenth century the Russian culture; and now
more and more the American.
In the name of the untouched quality of the pure Finnish semiosphere one
seeks to reject all elements coming from outside which cannot be fused with the
semiosphere itself. At the same time, in the resistance to Americanism, for in-
stance, one is not necessarily opposed to Americanism itself, but to a certain new,
quick, and aggressive variant of Finnish behavior, which is called and supposed
to be something ‘American’. Since ‘quickness’ and ‘aggressiveness’ do not belong
to the inherited Topelian model of the Finnish identity and its modalities, they
have to be rejected. The myth of the slow Finns has to continue.
|
Part V: Precursors
Chapter 15
From absolute spirit to the community of
interpretation: Josiah Royce (1855–1916), the
American classic between Hegel and Peirce
15.1 Josiah Royce as a historical figure
Josiah Royce’s name may not immediately leap to mind as one related to current
semiotics. Peirceans, however, know of his role in the life of Charles S. Peirce,
whose fame has greatly overshadowed his contemporary colleague, although
Royce had a firmly established position in the American academic life of his
time. My interest in Royce is as a possible link between Hegel and semiotics.
This is not only because in Peirce’s system do we encounter those “Hegelian”
triadic distinctions, but rather because Hegel is one of the most important back-
ground figures in European semiotics, in the more “hermeneutic tradition” of
sign theories. In my own version of it – existential semiotics – many issues raised
by Jaspers, Heidegger, or Sartre come originally from Hegel. This holds true as
well for the early, still phenomenologically oriented structuralism of Merleau-
Ponty and Greimas, not to mention those again phenomenologically oriented
post-Greimassians in France and elsewhere.
What Max H. Fisch (1986) has written about the relationship between Peirce
and Hegel, in his lifelong studies of Peirce’s various philosophical sources, is of
course seminal. It was my privilege to meet and get to know this philosopher at
the Annual Meetings of the American Semiotic Society in the 1980s. Moreover,
some years ago I received a book entitled La philosophie americaine, peut-elle être
americaine? (1995) by the eminent Peirce scholar, Gérard Deledalle. In it the au-
thor interprets the entire American pragmatist movement: Peirce, Royce, William
James, side by side. Deledalle says this about Royce:
Born in California, Royce, after studies at the University of California followed courses by
Lotze in Göttingen then by the Hegelian G. S. D. Morris at Johns Hopkins University. Upon
the advice of William James, he decided to dedicate his life to philosophy. He first taught in
California and then, again upon the recommendation of James, obtained a chair at Harvard
where he taught until his death. Under the influence of Coleridge, Emerson had introduced
Kantian idealism to America, and there Royce, until the beginning of the 20th century, im-
posed an absolute idealism, which not only resisted pragmatism, but ultimately absorbed
it into an absolute pragmatism [. . . ]. Royce’s idealism is a typically American phenomenon,
not only in its pragmatist aspect, but especially by the logical dimension which Royce gave
it, whose origin is certainly in Lotze, but whose true inspiration was the inventor of prag-
matism and the first modern logician, Charles S. Peirce.
(Deledalle 1995: 115)
322 | 15 From absolute spirit to the community of interpretation: Josiah Royce
In my own efforts to penetrate Roycean philosophy, I first located his Basic Writ-
ings (Royce 1969), but those two volumes did not contain Royce’s semiotically
most exciting essays. I next got an edited version of his Lectures on Metaphysics
(1915–1916), and thereafter read his main work, The Problem of Christianity (1913).
Many works of Royce refer to Christian doctrine, but this does not mean that they
represent pure theology. The same is also true, for instance, reading Kierkegaard:
Christian theology is there, but what is interesting is the manner of philosophiz-
ing which has to be read through the lines. Quite similar is the case of the great
Russian contemporary of Royce, Vladimir Solovyov (1853–1900), a very influential
Russian philosopher who remains almost completely unknown in the West. As
with Royce, in his theology and his philosophy, Christian (in this case Greek Or-
thodox) doctrines are mixed with Hegelian and speculative German rationalism.
Figures like Royce and Solovyov might be topical at a convention of semioticians,
in a session on Forgotten Pioneers of Semiotics, as there used to be at meetings
of the American Society. But those figures are current for anyone who is seeking
new philosophical bases for any semiotic approach. As to spiritual connections
between two such extremely different thinkers as Solovyov and Peirce, both schol-
ars are “synechistic” in nature. In his essay Synechism, fallibilism and evolution,
Peirce writes the following: “Synechism is that tendency of philosophical thought
which insists upon the idea of continuity as of prime importance in philosophy
and in particular, upon the necessity of hypotheses involving true continuity”
(Peirce 1955: 354).
And where else would the idea of “continuity” come than from Hegel. Max
Fisch writes:
But though for his first attempts at a definition of continuity he turned to Aristotle and
Kant, Peirce the synechist thought of Leibniz and Hegel as his leading forerunners among
philosophers, because it was they who, in their different ways, and Hegel more than Leibniz,
had made continuity a central principle of philosophy.
(Fisch 1986: 263)
We must add that Peirce never studied Hegel deeply and was in no phase of his
life a typically Hegelian thinker. But among his close friends there was one who
had studied Hegel deeply, and it was Royce. Fisch has verified that as late as in
May 1902 – when Peirce was already over sixty – he wrote to Royce and proposed
that he come to Arisbe, Peirce’s country home in Delaware and spend the summer
there, so that the two could pitch into logical problems and Royce could teach
Peirce more about Hegel. But Royce declined, and so we can only mourn the fact
that Peirce’s only occasion to get familiar with Hegel never came to pass.
Now let us move on to some information about Royce’s life, in order to have
sufficient background for the presentation of his ideas. If you still wonder why
15.1 Josiah Royce as a historical figure | 323
I bring this figure into a book on semiotics, one hopes that at least his proximity to
Peirce would justify it. Following this introduction, I need to answer another, per-
haps even more serious question, namely, Why Hegel and semiotics? Why should
we return to this philosopher, whose work some consider “mere conceptual po-
etry”? But first, about Royce.
There exists no good biography of this enigmatic figure in American intellec-
tual history. Mrs. Royce said it was her husband’s personal wish that his personal
history not be published. Still, according to McDermott there are two aspects of
his life that should be taken into account: his early religious experience and the
ambivalent nature of his personality as a “preacher” in the role of an extraordin-
ary intellectual virtuoso (McDermott 1969: 4).
Royce was deeply influenced by the frontier experience of his early days in
California, and his individualism can be traced to this background. He accom-
modated his individualism, however, to “imported” European metaphysics. At
the same time, we cannot separate Royce’s individualism from his idea of com-
munity. And here his religious sectarianism comes into the picture. Puritanism in
the American context was a form of non-conformism as well as an effort to form
a community against the experience of suffering. One of Royce’s very early essays
was on the “Practical Significance of Pessimism”, which opens with comments
about looking at a battlefield after the struggle, with all the wounded people, their
groans, pains, and anguish. He asks what human life is, then answers:
“A vapor vanishing in the sun? No, that is not insignificant enough. A wave, broken on the
beach? No, that is not unhappy enough. A soap bubble bursting into thin air? No, even that
has rainbow hues. What then? Nothing but itself. Call it human life”.
(McDermott 1969: 6)
Royce was a typical Californian in a nineteenth-century culture dominated by the

New England mind. Those of Puritan lineage suffered from inferiority-complex
thinking, typical of the fine and elegant European style of New Englanders, and
to compensate for this they made plain dress and natural expression into posit-
ive virtues. In this sense Royce’s philosophy mirrors a colonial experience. After
studies in Germany, Royce accepted a position in California but was deeply dissat-
isfied, claiming there was “no philosophy in California, from Siskoy to Ft. Yuma,
and from the Golden Gate to the summit of the Sierras”.
This, however, did not stop Royce from writing “ponderous and brilliant”
philosophical prose and analyses of logic and metaphysics, as well as unabashed-
ly sentimental, popular pieces. He was described in a journal article by John Jay
Chapman:
I always had that feeling of Royce that he was a celestial insect. Time was nothing to him.
He was just as fresh at the end of a two hours’ disquisition as at the start. Thinking refreshed
him. Royce had a phenomenal memory; his mind was a card-indexed cyclopaedia of all
philosophy. Many of his admirers like William James saw this also as his weakness. It was
said: if only he had never been taught to read Royce would have been a very great man.
(Chapman 1919: 372, 377)
Royce’s life touched Peirce’s on many levels, and he is mentioned in Joseph

Brent’s Peirce biography in at least six major sections. Brent (1993) claims that few
in the professional American academy were able to appreciate Peirce’s originality
of mind and his real achievements until well after the turn of the century.
The years 1883–1891 marked the destruction of Peirce’s career and the begin-
ning of his descent into ruin and poverty. He was dismissed without warning from
Johns Hopkins University and accused of negligence of his duties at the Coastal
Survey. Royce was one of his very few defenders. Peirce, with his wife Juliette,
would visit Royce’s house where the two would talk about synechism. In 1886
Peirce visited Cambridge and his brother Jem’s house, where James, Royce, Fiske,
Francis Abbot and Ralph Barton Perry were present. Apart from Royce, no one
understood Peirce’s triadic logic. Later, in 1891, Peirce tried to save his classmate
Francis Ellingwood Abbot in a dispute which is one of the most unpleasant events
in the history of American philosophy. It started with Royce’s “professional warn-
ing” in the International Journal of Ethics, where he accused Abbot, one of the
original members of the Metaphysical Club and author of the book Scientific The-
ism, of fraud and plagiarism. Peirce took Royce’s attack as wrong-headed and
wrote to The Nation: “Prof. Royce’s article was written with the avowed purpose
of ruining Dr Abbot’s reputation. Royce was plainly, overtly trying to injure Abbot
and take away his bread and butter.”
Both Abbot and Peirce were outlaws of a sort, and Abbot later committed
suicide (1903). He wrote in his diary: “I am still toiling to finish my great work,
yet with no hope of a hearing now or after my death”. Peirce wrote five years
later in despair: “Nobody understands me, America is no place for such as I am.
I detest life and just as soon as I can frame up a plausible excuse to myself, [. . . ]
I shall follow Frank Abbot’s example – except that I shall leave no unreadable
book behind me. No, no.” Nevertheless, the Abbot episode was soon forgotten,
and a year later Peirce and Royce became allies, and Royce studied Peirce’s logic.
To conclude this introduction, it should be said that one reason for my fore-
grounding Royce is that his philosophizing deals with problems of relevance also
to my own reflections in existential semiotics, some basic ideas of which easily
be interpreted in the light of Roycean philosophy, starting with the nature of the
concept of Dasein, and what it means.
15.2 Why Hegel? | 325
To speak of Dasein and transcendence, affirmation and negation, and the like,
is possible only on the basis of Hegelian logic. But Royce’s ideas might help to us
develop also a theory of social semiotics as something existential, since for Royce
the social nature of things was quite fundamental, an aspect that remains to be
developed since my original foray into existential semiotics (Tarasti 2000).
15.2 Why Hegel?
In the chapter on Solovyov who, like Royce, was deeply interested in moral is-
sues, I try to define a “Romantic semiotics”, the basic axioms of which are these:
(1) Meanings exist even before one starts to analyze and explicate them (the her-
meneutic principle of preunderstanding, Vorverständnis). (2) Meanings are based
upon processes; that is, they reveal themselves gradually during changes and
in the development of time, place and subject. (3) They take shape immanently,
within a certain “system”. (4) They emerge from differences within a system. Such
principles have, as their inner law, that the immanent gradually becomes mani-
fest, a process called much later the “generation” of meanings, as in Chomsky’s
linguistic “trees” and Greimas’s “generative course” and similar semiotic con-
structions. We shall later see whether Royce’s philosophy fulfils these criteria.
For now let us see how Royce’s experience of Hegelianism may be taken as
an analogy to what happened in Finland in the nineteenth century. There Hegel’s
doctrine is connected to the name of Johan Vilhelm Snellman, the great states-
man and awakener of the national spirit, whose statue stands before the Bank
of Finland in Helsinki and whose portrait hangs at Helsinki University among the
gallery of national heroes. First, Snellman was a philosopher and visited Germany
only thirty years earlier than Royce. Even he felt the colonialist pressure, and
the typically Finnish inferiority complex (like that among the American Puritans,
mentioned above, in elevating simplicity as a virtue). Snellman wrote interesting
cultural-semiotic descriptions of his travels in Germany in which he ironized the
Schöngeist culture of Berlin. In 1848 Snellman defended his thesis in Tübingen on
the topic Die Idee der Persönlichkeit.
But does the fact that Snellman was Hegelian justify the currency of Hegel
today? Now that the idea of the national is gradually fading away in the European
Union and becoming only a picturesque regional quality, an object of semiotics
of tourism rather than a semiotics of political culture? Now that the last castles
of totalitarian thought, based on one version of Hegelianism, have collapsed in
Europe, does Hegel retain any kind of actuality? Indeed it does. The fact is that
we live a more Hegelian time than ever, but in a completely new sense than the
Marxists could imagine. Electronic mass communication has made the world into
a kind of Hegelian or synechistic continuum, in which tout se tient. Anything that

happens in one place is known everywhere. The Absolute Spirit of our time is
communication, media, hypermedia, internet, virtual reality, and more.
In the case of Snellman, he as a statesman exemplifies how practical action
can be based on a consistent philosophy. Snellman’s successor in the chair of
philosophy at Helsinki University, K. G. T. Rein, wrote that Snellman was a signific-
ant man in spite of his Hegelianism. There are, however, valid reasons to suppose
that semiotics could serve as a theory of the contemporary world in the same way
as Hegelianism did in its time. It might be interesting to make idea historical com-
parisons in this sense¹. But this is enough background for my also taking Royce
seriously in semiotics.
Arnold Schönberg once asked, Why is there no Great American Music? In a
similarly polemical way one might ask, Why is there no Great German Semiotics?
The answer is simple: German semioticians rarely use their own roots in the
history of philosophy from Hegel and Kant to Heidegger, but have subordinated
themselves to Anglo-American empiricism. Nevertheless, great semioticians all
over the world are indebted to German speculative philosophy: from Peirce to
Lévi-Strauss, from Lotman to Kristeva. Greimas said he felt much more empathy
with those Romantic scholars than with the empirical positivists who, among
other things, tried to show that ancient Finns were ridiculous in their worship
of stones or trees: in fact, no one worshiped a stone or a tree, but the spirit that
was living in them. And how Hegelian is Marcel Proust, in his belief that a spirit
looms in every object, which a person provided with the right instinct can free.
One might thus interpret Hegel’s Absolute Spirit (Geist) simply as the semiotic
content. Such a semiotics could become a cornerstone of new semiotic thought,
just as medieval (Scholastic) Catholic theology and philosophy have become for
Umberto Eco and John Deely.
Now, an essential distinction in semiotic theory is whether we think that
the binary opposition, the relation between two contrary terms – which Greimas
considered the beginning of all semiotics as early as in his Sémantique struc-
turale – prevails on the same level of reality (as do s1 and s2), or whether they
are thought to be situated on two different levels of reality (Greimas’s distinction,
paraître/être). The first-mentioned semiotics investigates a text first as a linear
unit; whereas the latter catalyzes the semiotics operating in depth. One might
argue that the latter type of semiotics already appears in Saussure’s notions
1 At least in a country like Finland, the confrontation of semiotics and Hegelianism may prove
to be very exciting.
15.2 Why Hegel? | 327
signifiant/signifié or Hjelmslev’s expression/content, such that from the signifier,

one proceeds in depth into the signified.
Hegel’s science of logic can be interpreted as a kind of presemiotic generative
course, if we take into account both aspects – the parallel contrasts of Being/Not-
Being – as well as those phases proceeding in depth, namely Being, Essence, and
Existence. The internal Hegelian auto-movement of the concepts was a movement
on both levels. It would not be difficult in this sense to “Hegelianize” Greimas’s
semiotics. The basic modalities of Being and Doing, their negation, and the se-
miotic square which they form could be put into a spiral, such that Being would
lead linearly or syntagmatically to the appearance of the term Not-Being, from
there into Doing, and on to Not-Doing. Thereupon the next phase would again
start with Being, but Being on a new qualitative level, one step higher than at the
starting point.
Figure 15.1: The Hegelian movement from being to not-being
Hegel says, “Logic has to be conceived as the system of pure reason, the realm of
pure thought. This realm is the truth as such, without a veil, both in itself and for
itself” (Hegel 2010: 50). If we replace the word logic with the term “semiotics”, we
get a new definition of semiotics.
In Hegel’s thought, all the variety, alterations, and contingencies of Being –
the stable, durable element – are represented by the concept and the generality
hidden within it. Even this is compatible with semiotics, since such a phe-
nomenon, too, can be seen as a product of semiotic concepts and mechanisms,
and can at the same time be reduced to abstract notions and to their articula-
tions as certain engagements and disengagements of spatio-temporal-actorial
substances. Hegel considered it his task to make us conscious of “the logical
[read: semiotical] nature which animates the spirit, strives and acts therein”. For
him, there is nothing in the object other than what has been invested therein.
Hence, we may say that the “object” is a semiotic object, constructed by the
Doing, Being, Acting, Knowing, Capable, Believing and so on, of a modal subject.
To Hegel’s mind the object is nothing but the totality of a concept. In other words,
the object consists of all those semiotic articulations and operations which we
invest therein and by which we interpret it. One may see this corresponding to
semiotical “analysis without residue”, that is to say, that nothing may remain in
the object that was not semiotically construed. Hjelmslev’s exhaustivity principle
would thus be fulfilled.
On the other hand, there is a danger in Hegel’s system and in some semiotic
theories as well, which is that of launching a heavy conceptual mechanism in
order to solve a relatively small problem. Complexity is needlessly multiplied.
Therefore one should also learn the bon usage de la sémiotique. Using the Grei-
massian system, for instance, one must know to situate the analysis only on a
certain level of the generative course. Unnecessary complexity is the aspect of
Hegel strongly criticized by Bertrand Russell. The latter remarked that, in order to
use the word “John” correctly and reasonably, I do not need to know everything
about John but only enough to recognize him. He no doubt participates in man-
ifold relationships, close or distant, with everything that exists in the world, but
we can speak about him while ignoring all that which is not immediately present
in what is said. In Russell’s view, Hegelian doctrine is related to the premise that
there is more truth in the whole than in the parts. This premise was taken up later
by the structuralists.
Hegel asserted that the truth is a totality. But the latter is only an essence,
totality is only an essence, which is completing itself through its development.
The totality is essentially the result: only at the end is it what it is in truth or reality.
In this sense, Hegel connects the concept of truth to the aspect of temporality and
the seme of perfectivity.
He divides logic into three parts. First come objective and subjective logic,
these being the logics of Being and Concept, which can be easily paralleled with
the distinction between empirical semiotics, investigating various pragmatic con-
ceptual sign systems, and the theoretical-interpretative semiotic tradition. These
two Hegelian branches join into a third, mediating and reflective branch: the logic
of essences (Wesenslogik).
Is there also a mediation between the corresponding two kinds of semiot-
ics? What would mediate between objective semiotics – say empirical studies of
signs, biosemiotics, and the like – and more subjective semiotics, such as the
Greimassian system, Kristevan semiotics, Derridean deconstruction, and so on?
If objective semiotics gives us taxonomies of things – like Sebeok’s taxonomy of
15.2 Why Hegel? | 329
the drums and whistle system – then subjective semiotics, similar to Hegelian sub-
jective logic, organizes taxonomies into various kinds of semiotic models, by such
notions as isotopies, débrayage, figures, difference, khora, etc. How this shift takes
place would form a proper “Wesenssemiotik”. This would mean a particular her-
meneutic realization, in which the semiotic essence or nature of a phenomenon
is suddenly revealed. The observer suddenly realizes – this is in fact a semiotic
problem! This is not necessarily a momentary intuition, say, of this type: in a
bank the first number of the queuing number denotes the cashier, and the second
number one’s turn. Rather, it involves a more complex series of inferences, as in
Peirce’s abduction. Greimas never explicitly presented such rules of inference;
but they must exist – otherwise semiotic analysis would not be possible. There
is very little research about the “path” by which one recognizes a phenomenon to
be of a semiotic nature. If both Hegel and his Finnish pupil Snellman emphasize
“self-consciousness” and “the movement of the spirit”, then let us presume that
our analogy with Hegel is not far-fetched, if we want to develop this sphere of
knowledge based on understanding.
Now, Hegel’s Wesenslogik went no further than definitions of identity, differ-
ence, and contrast. In Greimassian terms, such a reflection went no further than
the relationships included in the semiotic square. Hegel says that in science one
has to develop from a notion an idea that represents the reason in the object.
He moreover states that to approach something as reasonable (read semiotically:
meaningful) signifies that one does not bring the reason to a phenomenon from
the outside, but that the object is reasonable as such already. This recalls the
anthropological principle of emic observation: the phenomenon is studied im-
manently, with its own concepts.
For Hegel, the catalyzing force of a concept lies in its dialectics. And yet, it
has been argued that a dialectical method has to be sensitive to its object and that
the method cannot be separated from its object and be elevated to the status of an
abstract generality. Is semiotics an object-sensitive method, which would always
be based upon the “inner motion” of the empirical facts and adapt to that motion?
At least generation in the Greimassian method meets the requirements of such a
dialectics.
That is to say, the generation can be started or stopped at whatsoever level.
Accordingly, there must be a kind of “superlogic” or “metalogic” that determ-
ines which semiotic notions are reasonable for the portrayal of a phenomenon. In
Hegelian logic, the motion from being to absolute ideas can be interpreted simply
as moving from a text to a code, from the substance of a phenomenon and its
semes and phemes, to its deepest isotopy. Such reasoning is of course inductive,
but we can also turn the Hegelian/Greimassian logic upside down and proceed
from the deductive starting-point axiom – the absolute – towards being; or if the
reasoning is abductive then the movement may well stop on some level.
Hegel tied his logic to a sense of history and temporality: “No one can truth-
fully transcend his time as little as to peel off from his skin [. . . ]. Philosophy is
completely identical with its time.” We see this as well in the history of semiot-
ics. Semiotics is always bound up with the level of knowledge reached in each
epoch and unfolds from a total epistemic situation prevailing in the sciences and
various national scholarly traditions. When we think of the intellectual climate
in Germany at the time Snellman and Royce were there, we notice analogies to
semiotics. When Snellman visited Tübingen, it was said that some had come from
Hegel’s school and some from empirical research; whereas the first-mentioned
tried to complete their philosophical speculation with criticism and history writ-
ing, the latter aimed at explaining empirical facts. Therefore despite the variety of
disciplines and views represented there at the time, family resemblances domin-
ated in scientific thought. The same can be said about semiotics and semioticians,
whether biosemioticians, social semioticians, Greimassians, Peirceans, Lotmani-
ans, Derrideans, or otherwise.
We need go no further with hypothetical analogies between the Hegelianisms
of the mid-nineteenth century and semiotics of the turn of the twenty-first cen-
tury². With this background in Hegel, we can return to Royce.
15.3 Back to Royce
Royce’s early thought was very much under the influence of Hegel, and thus was
to a large extent based on a distinction between the absolute and the individual.
Such a statement is found in his essay “The Conception of God” from 1897, in
the middle of his career. But from this moment on Royce gradually moves from
the Hegelian concept of the Absolute, certainly under the influence of Peirce,
and heads in a more empirical direction with his new concept of “interpretation”.
A common thread throughout his writing is the idea of community, which displays
itself also in his more journalistic writings, such as his essays “The Squatter Riot
of 1850 in Sacramento” (1899), “Race Questions and Prejudices” (1908), and
“Provincialism” (1908).
2 It has, however, not been said (yet) of any semiotician as was said about Mr. Axel Adolf Laurell,
a docent of theoretical philosophy and Hegelianism in the 1840s in Helsinki; namely, that he had
taken ten years to get familiar with Hegel, and another ten years to get rid of him.
In existential semiotic terms, Royce confronts the problem between the Ab-
solute in the form of some ideas which are imperfectly realized in the life of an
individual, that is to say, the problem between transcendental ideas and the world
of Dasein. The latter is certainly the Roycean World of Doubt as he puts it: “When
we turn from our world of ideals to the world actually about us, our position is not
at once a happy position. These ideals . . . do not make the world, and people differ
endlessly about what the world [in our terms, Dasein] is and means”. Still, Royce
thinks it necessary to study the world in its eternal aspect. He admits however the
possibility of error in dealing with what we have called “transcendental ideas”:
That there is error is indubitable. What is however an error? . . . No single judgement is or can
be an error. Only as actually included in a higher thought, that gives to the first its completed
object, and compares it therewith is the first thought an error. It remains otherwise a mere
mental fragment, a torso, but the higher thought must include the opposed truth, to which
the error is compared in that higher thought. The higher thought is the whole truth, of which
the error is by itself an incomplete fragment.
From this Royce infers that thought is infinite, clearly sounding the Hegelian tone
of his early writings. In his massive work, The World and the Individual (1899–
1901), the fundamental theme is the relationship between the “idea” and “being”.
But from here Royce takes a new, more semiotical path. Alongside the concepts
of conception (idea) and perception (being), he brings in the concept of inter-
pretation. In psychological terms he characterizes interpretation as an essentially
social process that transforms our inner life into a conscious, internal conversa-
tion, a form of autocommunication through which we “interpret ourselves”. From
this position Royce ends up with the idea of a community of interpretation, which
obtains metaphysical dimensions in his thought when he comes to the idea of
the Hope of the Great Community. Whether semioticians form this kind of ideal
community of interpretation I am not sure. Such a community is, at the least, very
controversial and certainly not “unified”. In Royce’s late work, The Problem of
Christianity (1913), Peirce’s impact is particularly strong; and in his lectures on
Metaphysics (1915–1916) he offers a synthesis of all his earlier achievements (see
Tarasti 2001).
15.4 Toward the world of interpretation
In his preface to The Problem of Christianity, Royce describes it as a result of re-

search that first appeared in his book of 1908, The Philosophy of Loyalty. He be-
lieves also that it is compatible and in harmony with his earlier The World and the
Individual from 1899–1901, but confirms that it is not a repetition of the old. Says
Royce:
I now owe much more to our great and unduly neglected American logician Mr Charles
Peirce, than I do to the common tradition of recent idealism, and certainly very much more
than to the doctrines attributed to Hegel. It is time I think that the long customary, but
unjust and loose usage of the adjective “Hegelian” should be dropped [. . . ] my own inter-
pretation [. . . ] despite certain agreements with the classical Hegelian theses, differs from
that of Hegel’s school, in important ways
The titles of the various chapters of Royce’s book give us a flavor of his thinking.
The chapters in Part One, called “Lectures”, are the following: Lecture I – The
Problem and the Method; II – The Idea of the Universal Community; III – The
Moral Burden of the Individual; IV – The Realm of Grace; V – Time and Guilt;
VI – Atonement; VII – The Christian Doctrine of Life; VIII – The Modern Mind
and Christian Ideas. Part II continues the lectures: IX – The Community and the
Time-Process; X – The Body and the Members; XI – Perception, Conception and
Interpretation; XII – The Will to Interpret; XIII – The World of Interpretation; XIV –
The Doctrine of Signs; XV – The Historical and the Essential; XVI – Summary and
Conclusion. In what follows I shall not pay too close attention to the theological
content of the book, but concentrate rather on its philosophical and semiotic es-
sence.
Royce starts the first Lecture by pondering the sense in which a modern man
can be a Christian. Interesting here is what Royce considers “modern”. He takes
it as a completely fictive entity, such that the creation of our day’s discussion will
be replaced as early as tomorrow by a new type of modern man: “For by modern
man most of us mean a being whose views are supposed to be in some sense not
only the historical result but a significant summary, of what the ages have taught
mankind” (Royce 1969: 63). So modern man is the product of what history has
taught mankind. Such a definition is certainly far from the so-called Project of
the Modern, or “modernity”, meaning the separation of Man from the cosmos,
as Charles Taylor puts it. Of course even Royce’s type of modernity includes the
aspects of history and education, and thus the possibility to change, to redefine
one’s essence, and in this sense his view might be interpreted in parallel to later
philosophical definitions of modernity.
For Royce the Christian doctrine contains three essential ideas. First is the
assertion that the way of salvation lies in the union of the individual with a uni-
versal spiritual community. The idea of a union becomes a constant theme in
Royce’s philosophy following his early experiences with Puritanism. Second is
the idea of the individual’s moral burden, including that apart from the spiritual
community, which the divine plan provides for his relief; in short, the individual is
powerless to escape from his innate and acquired character the character of a lost
soul. This idea of guilt and a plan to get rid of it may be interpreted as a particular
narrative program. For example, there is in Proppian theory an initial lack and a
special narrative program to remedy it: to be disjuncted from the dysphoric object
of guilt and conjuncted with the euphoric object of grace. Royce’s view could be
semiotized in this manner. The third point is much the same: the only escape for
the individual, the only union that he can obtain with the divine spiritual com-
munity, is provided by the divine plan for the redemption of mankind. In terms
of modernity, the crucial thing here is union with a community and not with the
cosmos itself. In Roycean terms, the idea of community intervenes between the
individual and his salvation; hence he gives this level of community more and
more emphasis as time goes on.
In Lecture II Royce speaks of the idea of a universal community which again
evokes semiotic interpretations. He writes: “As an essentially social being, man
lives in communities, and depends upon his communities for all that makes his
civilization articulate (ibid.: 80). Royce believes also in the metaphor of organic
unity:
[Communities] have a sort of organic life of their own so that we can compare a highly
developed community, such as a state, either to the soul of a man or to a living animal.
A community is not a mere collection of individuals. It is a sort of live unit, which has organs,
as the body of an individual has organs [. . . ]. Not only does the community live, it has a
mind of its own a mind whose psychology is not the same as the psychology of an individual
human being. (Royce 1969)
Here we see the influence of Wilhelm Wundt as well as the organistic tradition of
philosophy.
The next point is the concept of Loyalty, by which Royce understands “willing
and thoroughgoing devotion of a self to a cause, and which is therefore the interest
of a community”. We could thus also interpret Loyalty to be the principle which
holds the community together, and if the community is the same as the Dasein of
existential semiotics, then loyalty is the principle whereby an individual can tran-
scend his own Dasein, both toward other Daseins and toward pure transcendence.
Royce eloquently describes empirical cases of loyalty: the individual revels in his
service, as a player to his team, the soldier to his flag, the martyr to his church.
He speaks of a social enthusiasm which thus animates individuals. And he says
that loyal motives are not only moral but also aesthetic: “The community may be
to the individual both beautiful and sublime” (ibid.: 84).
This remark calls to mind the ways in which some semioticians and aesthet-
icians view our postmodern world. Wolfgang Welsch (1996), for example, holds
the Nietzschean view that the whole contemporary world can be understood only
as an aesthetic phenomenon. But can the whole world of media and worldwide
electronic communication be seen otherwise, as the realization of Royce’s Great
Community? Deeper analysis may prove this “community” to be an illusion, how-
ever, since the effect of all these modern technological means of communication
has been rather the contrary one: to isolate people from real loyalty and commu-
nication, each in his or her own “bubble” world.
Moreover, Royce says that those who are loyal are essentially alike. Such a
universal community that Royce has in his mind is in essence a community of the
Same, of people thinking and acting in similar ways. Maybe through the media
power of the modern world people become loyal in that sense; that is, similar in
their values and enterprises – the instantiation of what is called “globalization”.
Even here Royce remains very Hegelian, when he states that loyalty is “a practical
faith that communities, viewed as units, have a value which is superior to all the
values and interests of detached individuals”. How different this view is from that
of the great British contemporary of Royce, John Ruskin, who emphasized the
individual, not the group, as the one who thinks and judges and evaluates, not
the group.
15.5 The moral burden of the individual
Royce believes in original sin and the moral burden of the individual, who un-
aided cannot escape that condition. This leads him to reflections on social mat-
ters, which are more relevant in our semiotic context. Anyone who studies human
nature must make a distinction between the conduct of men and their conscious-
ness of it, says Royce. In his view, all of our more complex conduct and conscious-
ness is trained by a specific sort of environment, namely a social environment.
As solitary beings we could never develop ourselves. If a man or an animal were
to live in a totally unsocial state, he as a solitary creature could find no other
instance of conduct with which to compare his own. Whatever occurs in our actual
social life can be and often is repeated with endless variations in our memory and
imagination. Thus these thoughts and memories enrich our social environment.
In this way we are able to compare ourselves with others, and this comparison
makes us view ourselves and attend to the social will, which is “law”.
His reasoning here comes very close to that of George Herbert Mead and his
view on the origin of symbols, namely his distinction between “I” and “me”, the
latter being our ego as seen by others. This type of Will (vouloir) represents a
special modality: a co-actorial, social Will.
But Royce is quite a realist in his ideas about the nature of the social,
and he has no illusions. True, the aforementioned comparison leads to self-
consciousness, but also to rivalry, contest or criticism, about which Royce gives
the intuitively obvious rule: “The greater the social tension of the situation in
which I am placed, the sharper and clearer does my social contrast with my
fellows become to me” (Royce 1969: 111). Hence the greater the social tension,
the more I am aware of my own conduct. Therefore conflicts are an inevitable
part of one’s spiritual, or as we might say, existential development. This does not
mean that we should be at war with our fellows, but rather that we become self-
conscious as moral beings through the spiritual warfare of mutual observation in
the course of rivalry. He gives us the maxim that “the moral self, then the natural
conscience, is bred through situations that involve social tension” (ibid.). Thus we
see that Royce is not a mystic recommending withdrawal from the world. Rather,
our level of moral being depends on the social community in which we live, on
the whole Dasein, which includes our fellows as well.
On the ethical side, this situation increases the moral burden of the indi-
vidual, making it ever more heavy. Society always breeds men who are inwardly
enemies of each other, because every man in a highly cultivated social world is
trained in moral self-consciousness by his social conflicts. High social cultivation
breeds spiritual enmities, for it instils what we call “individualism”. The higher
the cultivation, the vaster and deeper, the more spiritual and more significant of
these inward and outward conflicts. Therefore Royce argues that individualism
and collectivism are tendencies, each of which, as our social order grows, intens-
ifies the other.
To see how true this is, one need only follow the history of the arts – not
to speak of the sciences, and not least in semiotics: ongoing polemics, various
schools fighting each other, eminent artists and scholars at odds. In semiotics,
Are you Peircean or Greimassian? was the question for a long time, the answer
leading immediately to an unavoidable and unresolvable conflict.
In the next Lecture, “The Realm of Grace”, Royce tries to resolve the above-
mentioned problem. The solution lies in the nature of the community to which
one belongs, a community that can be either good or evil, beneficent or mischiev-
ous. Royce postulates an ideal group, however, which he calls the “Beloved Com-
munity”. It embodies values that no individual as a detached being could even
remotely approach. Such a society is based upon the principle of Loyalty. It is
taught by a great leader, but such a person must himself be loyal, and in order
to be loyal he must first find his lovable community. Loyalty is thus a concept that
is fulfilled in our Dasein.
The next Lectures, on “Time and Guilt” and “The Atonement”, are of a more
theological nature. More to our present concerns is the chapter on “The Com-
munity and the Time-Process”, in which Royce addresses the problem of exist-
ential loneliness.
Royce adheres to the Leibnizian doctrine of monads. One man cannot feel the
physical pain of another man. What he feels is his own emotional reverberation at
the sight of its symptoms. Royce believes that each of us lives within the charmed
circle of his own conscious will and meaning; each of us is more or less clearly the
object of his own inspection, but remains hopelessly beyond the direct observa-
tion of his fellows. My act is my own – an echo of contemporary social pluralism –
but when one belongs to a social community, the situation changes. Our ethical
pluralism makes us proudly state, My deed is my own! But our collective life makes
us say not I act thus , but Thus the community acts in and through me³. So he in
fact draws the same conclusion as that of the later structuralists, from Lacan to
Foucault.
At this moment Royce introduces the notions of history and memory. The
individual self is no mere present datum or collection of data but is based upon an
interpretation of the sense and value of life, which in turn carries the memory of
its own past. Royce asks, Can many different selves, all belonging to the present
time, possess the identically same past as that of their own, personally interesting
past life? Royce’s response: A community constituted by the fact that each of its
members accepts, as part of his own individual life and self, the same past events
that each of his fellow-members accepts may be called a “community of memory”.
Further, a community whose members accept the same future for themselves can
be called a community of expectation and ultimately a community of hope. Clearly
such ideas are intimately bound with the idea of temporality, as it explains meta-
physically the emergence of an historical community.
The next Lecture, on “The Body and the Members”, adds much to the value
of temporality. Royce thinks that the first condition upon which any kind of com-
munity depends is the power of an individual self to extend his life, in an ideal
fashion, so as to regard it as including past and future events which lie far away
in time. The self is essentially a life that is interpreted in a certain way and that
interprets itself. Royce believes memory and hope to be the strongest forces to
function as such extensions.
In modern semiotic terms, such extensions are nothing other than the modal-
ities postulated by Greimassian semiotics. Without modalities a communication
would not be possible, insofar as every act of communication entails an effort to
fill or bridge the gap between subjects s1 and s2. Heidegger, on the other hand,
spoke about Sorge, care or worry, as the basic human attitude in the life of a Dasein
(community). Heideggerian “care” would be the same as modality as such, but
without any particular manifestation as Will, Know, Can, and so on.
3 Royce quotes the German: “Ich denke nicht, sondern es denkt mir.”
Thus the real deeds of a community are cooperative. Every individual, in his
own extended life, includes also the cooperative deeds of other members of the
society. Men form a community only insofar as they cooperate.
With this Royce has laid the foundation for what follows in the book: sign
theories in the proper sense. This part starts with Lecture XI, on “Perception, Con-
ception and Interpretation”. Here Royce relies heavily on Peirce, and one might be
tempted to think that the whole significance of Royce to semiotics would be simply
that he managed to insert Peircean sign theory into a social semiotic context.
The concept of interpretation is crucial. Royce adduces concrete cases familiar
to anyone: a stranger in a foreign country, a philologist rendering the meaning of
a text, a judge construing a statute – always interpretation is involved.
Royce admits his indebtedness to Peirce, and regrets his earlier misunder-
standing of the latter’s thought. He reports that Peirce in fact invented pragmat-
icism, which at that time was being much developed by William James. Moreover,
Royce says that Peirce was in no way under the influence of Hegel or German
idealism. Royce even says that, twelve years ago, Peirce wrote the following in
a letter to him: “But when I read you, I do wish you would study logic. You need it
so much.” We shall later see that Royce’s understanding and usage of Peirce were
quite unique.
When defining the difference between perception and conception Royce
quotes Bergson’s metaphor of a gold coin as perception and a bank note as
conception. The notes constitute promises to pay the cash, and conceptions
are useful guides to possible perceptions. This is illustrated by the case of our
travels abroad. In one’s own country his coins are valid, but beyond its borders
those bank notes may have no value. When we communicate with our fellow
men, we are like these travelers: crossing the boundary into a new country, we
encounter there a largely strange world of perceptions and conceptions. We are
never sure about our neighbors’ perceptions, but their conceptions are so generally
communicable that they can be taken as identical with our own. This process of
passing from conceptions to perceptions is precisely interpretation. When Hamlet
says to Ophelia, “I never loved you”, and Ophelia answers, “But that is what
you made me believe”, then we have a typical case of interpretation – and of
misunderstanding.
Royce gives as another example of interpretation: an Egyptologist who
translates an inscription. At first, two things are needed: the translator and his
text. But he also needs a language into which the inscription will be translated.
So the translator interprets something, but he interprets it only to one who can
read English. If the reader knows no English, we do not have interpretation. Here
already we have a triad: the Egyptian text, the Egyptologist-translator, and the
possible English reader. They are all equally necessary. The mediator (translator,
interpreter) must know both languages, and thus be intelligible to both persons
whom his translation is to serve. We have a triadic relation: (A) Somebody
interprets (B) somebody/something (C) to somebody. And this is essentially a
non-symmetrical relation; that is to say, the terms must be in this order. When
a man perceives something the relation is dyadic. A perceives B. But when A
interprets B to C we need three terms. Royce goes further, reasoning that when a
man undertakes conscious reflection, he interprets himself to himself. Even here
the triadic relationship obtains.
Man interprets his past self, say, as a promise to his future self: “This is what
I meant when I made that promise.” Here three men are present and taking part in
the interior conversation: the man of the past whose promises, notes, old letters,
etc. are interpreted; the present self who interprets them; and the future self to
whom the interpretation is addressed.
Royce insists that this process of interpretation differs psychologically from
perception and conception, in these ways: (1) There is always someone who ad-
dresses someone. (2) The interpreted object is itself something of a mental nature.
Peirce uses the term “sign” to designate this mental object. (3) Since the interpret-
ation is a mental act, the interpretation itself is a Sign, and this new sign calls
for further interpretation. Hence the social process is endless, as with infinite se-
miosis. Perception terminates in the object perceived, and conception is satisfied
with defining a universal type or ideal form of somebody’s thought. But interpret-
ation both requires the sign to be an interpreter and a further interpretation of its
own act, because it addresses some third being. In Royce’s opinion, only death
can stop this process of interpretation.
The next lecture bears a very Schopenhauerian title, “The Will to Interpret”.
The will to interpret makes its three members into a community of interpretation.
Royce correctly points out that all this evokes the Hegelian dialectic, wherein
thesis, antithesis, and higher synthesis play their roles. But Royce says that
Peirce’s idea of the mediating third has, historically speaking, nothing to do
with Hegel. Peirce’s concept is a very general process, of which the Hegelian
dialectic is only a special case. Hegel’s illustrations of his own processes are
ethical and historical. Still, says Royce, there is no incompatibility between Peirce
and Hegel. When we take on the role of interpreter we enter the Community of
Interpretation. Nevertheless, the problem remains: how can we know that any
community of interpretation exists? This question brings us again to the very
center of metaphysics. Royce answers that, since we all have the will to interpret,
there must be somewhere a community that is aiming towards such a goal. So
for him the ultimate instance of reality is the Community itself. Any conversation
with other people, as any process of our inner self-consciousness, unfolds only as
it is based on the thesis that we are all members of a community of interpretation.
This is the real world for Royce, and his definition of reality. He simply sees it, like
Peirce, as a semiosis, a process of interpretation, the only difference between him
and Peirce being that for Royce the process of interpretation is essentially social.
15.6 Royce’s metaphysics and last insights on interpretation
Royce’s Lectures on Metaphysics in 1915–1916 were drawn from notes taken by

his pupil Ralph W. Brown, these forming a synthesis of all his earlier thought.
Now reality, knowledge and truth cannot be separated from the community of
interpretation. The earlier Hegelian Absolute has been replaced by the idea of
interpretation. He confirms his idea of the self as being a kind of community of
its own. I am not merely my physical organism, is his first argument. The so-
called individual man is in certain respects a social group. He consists of various
selves. So he comes close to the idea of M1, M2, S2, S1 in the existential semiotics.
Royce’s view of the self is thus pragmatic: the self is nothing given; rather, it is
expressed in a life. You are yourself by virtue of the fact that you are engaged in
doing something. One has memory and expectation, and in consequence every
man has a past and future life as essential parts of him. One has three different
selves: past self, present self, and future self. Thus Royce calls the self a “social
group” and lists concrete empirical cases of communities:
1. The judicial community consisting of A. Plaintiff, B. defendant, C. judge;
2. The banker’s community: A. borrower, B. lender or depositor, and C. banker;
3. The agent’s community: A. agent, B. principal, and C. client; and
4. the insurance community: A. insurer, usually a corporation, B. an “adven-
turer”, C. beneficiary.
All these communities display the same triadic morphology. If I buy insurance,
it is my future self who gets the money in an accident; a money-lender is in the
present, but the person who is going to receive the loan is in the future. So there is
not particular psychological continuity between past, present, and future selves.
Their stability establishes an ethical relation among the various selves.
The general formula for identity is coherence of life plan or what we might
in semiotics call a narrative program. Royce reasons that the self is defined as
a life lived in accordance with a plan, or to use the word idea, as a life with a
coherent idea. In existential semiotics this would mean a life that is following
some transcendental idea and is in this manner becoming something existential.
Perhaps the most important passage in Royce’s lectures, for us at least, un-
folds his notion of “The Triadic Community of Interpretation”. The cooperation
of A and C brings them into some sort of social unity, which makes them think
and feel as if they were one person. The same sort of unity may characterize an
individual. He is not an individual because he has an individual organism. Rather,
a self is a self by virtue of the fact he or she is doing something that constitutes
a plan having unity or coherence. Royce then says, contrary to behaviorism, that
this unity is something one cannot grasp by merely observing the organism, but
only by discerning what a man means, what he is after. This parallels our un-
derstanding of narrativity, when we speak of a desire as the catalyzing force: the
actors are defined by what they are seeking. In communities of interpretation, the
most important function is the inter-mediation brought about by B. Thanks to it,
A, B, and C act as if they were one man. To bring about such solidarity is the main
task of B.
The interpreter, we recall, is the one who addresses C on behalf of A; and as
Royce defines it, a self is a self by virtue of some coherence of plan. B is a self who
desires to carry out a plan which furthers not only A’s will alone, nor C’s will alone,
but rather the united will of all three. Therefore B must be loyal, the willing servant
of the cause and plan of C and A. Accordingly, B is always the most important
member of the community in question. It is B who both defines and expresses the
community’s united purpose. He more or less invents its united purpose. Thus B
as mediator is a truly active and creative person. He brings C into touch with A and
A into touch with C. The combined will of A and C has to be created constantly,
and that is B’s task. Hence he is the most obviously and explicitly loyal member
of the community.
For Royce, no activity of man is too lofty to be interpreted by a community of
interpretation. As an example he takes the scientific community as based on three
roles: collector of facts, the theorizer, and the verifier. These three phases corres-
pond to Peirce’s definitions of various ways of reasoning: collector – retroductive
methods, theorizer – deductive methods, and verifiers – inductive methods.
Thus we can now see that Royce in his late philosophy not only studied and
followed Peirce, but gave Peirce’s thought a new interpretation. Royce is only min-
imally a nominalist; that is, he does not turn philosophical problems into prob-
lems of language and naming. There is always something of a pragmatic attitude
in Royce’s reasoning. But some of his theories of the social nature of knowledge
and truth anticipate later theories of epistemes as social constructions. When he
emphasizes the role of B, the interpreter or mediator, he comes close to some
present-day media philosophers. It seems to us that many things exist only as
mediated by what we call “media”.
In science, as well, some people who only mediate others can have crucial
value – a comforting thought to organizers of scientific congresses, publishers of
journals, editors of others’ texts. Royce gives much value to such activities. Some
philosophers have levied the charge that, when we say something is a sign, we
diminish the “existentiality” of anything we are speaking about. It is “only” a

sign instead of being something real. Royce shows how erroneous such a view
is. Something is real only through the process of interpretation, which always
entails a corresponding community of interpretation. What position Royce will
retain in the development of social semiotics is hard to say. Yet, as I have tried
to show above, it is certain that he at least makes a genuine contribution to the
understanding of Peirce’s thought, as it reflects upon the possibilities for social
semiotics in the context of existential semiotics.
Chapter 16
Victoria Lady Welby – A pioneer of semiotic
thought rediscovered by Susan Petrilli
16.1 Introduction
The name of Victoria Lady Welby has become familiar to anyone studying semi-
otics in the last decades, thanks to the correspondence between her and Charles
S. Peirce, available since 1977, edited by Charles S. Hardwick, and published by
Indiana University Press. In that publication, Welby appears as an intellectual
companion of Peirce. Often “geniuses” (who are mostly men, as one may notice!)
need some other, less striking and independent correspondent in order to mirror
their ideas and develop them further without too much resistance or “intellec-
tual effort”, in the Bergsonian sense (Bankov 2000). In music, this phenomenon
was addressed by Alfred Einstein, cousin of Albert, who in his Greatness in Music
(1941) claimed that genius distinguishes itself from mere talent by what is called
in German Verdichtung (poetic density). This quality accounts for the difference
between Mozart and Salieri, Beethoven and Cherubini, Verdi and Donizetti, and
so on. If projected into the intellectual area, one might say that a genius has “dens-
ity” in his text, whereas the other person, “the double”, would have less. Does this
mean, then, that Peirce’s thought is “dense” and Welby’s “thin”?
Moreover, the Berlin professor Walter Schmitz had also studied the Welby
phenomenon in many of his remarkable articles (see references). Yet, I learned
about them only after having written this chapter.
In any case, history must always be rewritten, and this Susan Petrilli has done
with her monumental editing and commentary on Lady Welby’s life and work,
in the recent 1048-page volume entitled Signifying and Understanding: Reading
the Works of Victoria Welby and the Signific Movement (2009). Here Welby comes
through as an extremely exciting literary and philosophical woman intellectual
who was in touch with most of the famous names in science of her time, from
Henri Bergson to Bertrand Russell, who led her life in British upper-class circles
as the Maid-of-Honor of Queen Victoria, and who tried to get her voice heard as
a pioneer and independent thinker in the challenging fields of meaning and se-
mantics.
Yet, sad to say, she remained in the shadow of such figures as Michel Bréal,
who published his study on semantics in 1897, at the same time Welby was launch-
ing her own new science of “significs”. A major and deeper question raised by a
reading of Petrilli’s volume is, Why didn’t “significs” did become the dominant
16.2 The challenge of originality | 343
term for all issues concerning meaning and signification? Despite the fact that
some tried to launch a movement around it, as Petrilli shows, “significs” was never
taken into broader usage. Such was the case with all the other neologisms that
Welby invented.
In the age of feminism, the immediate and easy answer is of course, because
she was a woman. Yet even in this feminist age, no one has written about her work
as that of a woman genius. She was overlooked, for example, by Julia Kristeva in
her study on Le génie féminin (1997–2002), who instead chose for her examples
Melanie Klein, Hannah Arendt, and Colette (!). I once thought that if I were to
write such a treatise I would include Cosima Wagner, George Sand, and Simone
de Beauvoir. Yet now, after reading and learning about Welby, it seems to me that
there should be one from the Anglo-Saxon sphere as well. At the least, Welby
might number among what Gertrude Stein called “would-be-geniuses”. Or even
more?
16.2 The challenge of originality
Another, more generalized conception of the problem may be asked as follows:

Why do certain undeniable innovations in science remain unaccepted by the
majority? Everyone knows that the scholar’s life is a happy one so long as he/she
only repeats the commonplaces, the mainstream ideas, the accepted schools
and paradigms of thought. The problems start at the very moment when he/she
becomes or tries to become original. Most find this attempt odious, and turn
their backs on the dissident. Our genius candidate encounters particularly great
obstacles if he/she invents a new terminology or totally new concepts. Very few
thinkers see their neologisms accepted into general usage by scientific communit-
ies. Plato coined the “khora”, but it was not adapted for semiotics (by Kristeva)
until some 2000 years later. There was, however a scholar in Moscow who used
it in the meantime. All this is to say that there is a chain of communication and
transmission of ideas and concepts. Yet, before answering the question in the
case of Welby, we must examine her thought as such and determine whether it
really has such substance or “density” that would justify our speaking of her as a
forgotten pioneer in her field.
For this, Petrilli serves up convincing evidence gleaned from her meticulous
source-studies. In particular, there is an abundance of unpublished essays by
Welby, each of which reveals exciting ideas. But as you know, it is not enough to
have ideas and intuitions, as Greimas once said. In science, one has to put them
into discourse, into models that can be communicated to others. In this respect,
an interesting revelation by Petrilli, which I did not know, is that Welby never
344 | 16 Victoria Lady Welby – A pioneer of semiotic thought rediscovered by S. Petrilli
had what we call a formal education. Normally before entering academic life, one
has become at least a baccalaureate. Welby did not have even this. Whereas she
became extremely well-read, something in her texts may stem from her lack (or
avoidance) of formal training. Schemes or structures of scientific communication,
a kind of logic of discourse, are perhaps not lacking, but different in her reas-
oning. Non-British readers may say, Well, hers is only the typical Anglo-Saxon
fear of theory. Theorizing and conceptualizing are continental features, some-
thing “Cartesian” or “Hegelian”, both of which constituted horrors to those empir-
ically minded scholars in the Isles. As an instance of her reasoning, let us examine
how Welby uses the concept of “three”, which is so essential in Peirce.
16.3 The idea of “three”
Much study has gone into the origins of Peirce’s categories of First, Second, and
Third. For example we have Max H. Fisch’s essay collection, Peirce, Semeiotic and
Pragmatism (1986), where appear the chapters “Peirce’s Triadic Logic” and “Hegel
and Peirce”. In the former, Fisch shows the origin of triadism in Kantian logic,
about which Peirce said, “Kant, the King of modern thought, it was who first re-
marked the frequency in logical analysis of trichotomies or threefold distinctions”
(in Fisch 1986: 180). Peirce made that remark in his essay “One, Two, Three, Fun-
damental Categories of Thought and Nature” (1885). Peirce’s affinity with Hegel
was clear right from the start. William James noticed it, and Peirce himself several
times admitted it. Hegel’s objective logic operated with “Three” – namely Being,
Not-Being, Becoming – and obviously served as a model for Peirce’s semiotics,
as he wrote in 1902: “But now we have to examine whether there be a doctrine
of signs corresponding to Hegel’s objective logic, that is to say whether there be
a life in Signs, so that [. . . ] they will go through a certain order of development”
(Peirce, quoted in Fisch 1986: 273). A little later Peirce wrote to Welby: “My three
categories appear always more and more clear to me. These resulted from two
years’ incessant study in the direction of trying to do what Hegel tried to do. It
became apparent that there were such categories as his” (Peirce, quoted in Hard-
wick 1977: 189).
This has to be remembered, although Peirce in his famous declaration of se-
miotics in his letter to Welby in 1909 deems the nominalists to be wrong and
the realists to be right; he does not list Hegel among those nominalists on the
order of literateurs, samplers on the level of the wine tasters of Bordeaux, whereas
philosophers’ names from Kant to Leibniz do appear there. Here is Peirce’s famous
definition for the “real”: “Real is such that whatever is true of it is not true because
some individual person’s thought or some individual group of persons’ thought
16.4 Royce as Lady Welby’s contemporary | 345
attributes its predicate to its subject but it is true no matter what any person or
group of persons may think about it” (ibid.: 116). This definition, incidentally, is
exactly the same as that given by the British pre-semiotician John Ruskin, when
he said that opinions which are individually taken as wrong do not become right
by the fact that a majority of people support them.
16.4 Royce as Lady Welby’s contemporary
Of course, the Hegelian impact on Peirce stands out especially in his relations with
Josiah Royce, with whom Peirce planned to take lessons on Hegel quite at the end
of his life. Yet it is almost funny to notice how Royce, the best-known Hegelian in
the United States, himself emphasized his own originality. In the preface to his The
Problem of Christianity (1913) Royce says that the book is the result of researches
which first appeared in 1908 in his book The Philosophy of Loyalty. He believes that
it is also compatible and in harmony with his earlier The World and the Individual
(1899–1901), but insists that it is not a repetition of the old. He writes:
I now owe much more to our great and unduly neglected American logician Mr. Charles
Peirce, than I do to the common tradition of recent idealism, and certainly very much more
than [. . . ] to the doctrines attributed to Hegel. It is time I think that the long customary, but
unjust and loose usage of the adjective “Hegelian” should be dropped [. . . ] my own interpret-
ation [. . . ] despite certain agreements with the classical Hegelian theses, differs from that of
Hegel’s school, in important ways.
(Royce 1969)
Royce’s interests and output indicate a certain proximity or soul-mate affinity with
those of Welby. For if Welby included ethics and religion in her Significs, so did
Royce. Royce’s work is important in this context because he dealt with quite sim-
ilar topics as Welby, and at the same time. But these parallels did not intersect.
It is true, for instance, that the early Royce was very much under the influence
of Hegel. It has been said that his early thought was to a large extent based on a
distinction between the absolute and the individual. Such a statement is found
in his essay The Conception of God (1897), i.e., in the middle of his career. But
from this moment on Royce gradually moves from the Hegelian concept of the
Absolute, certainly under the influence of Peirce, and heads in a more empirical
direction with his new concept of “interpretation”. A common thread throughout
his writing is the idea of community, which displays itself also in his more journal-
istic writings, such as his essays the “Squatter Riot of 1850 in Sacramento” (1899),
“Race Questions and Prejudices” (1908), and “Provincialism” (1908).
Moreover, Royce inferred that thought is infinite, making the Hegelian tone
of his early writings quite clear. In his massive work, The World and the Indi-
vidual (1899–1901), the fundamental theme is the relationship between the “idea”
and “being”. But from this starting point Royce takes a new direction which we
may qualify as more semiotical in nature. Alongside the concepts of conception
(idea) and perception (being), he brings in the concept of interpretation. In psy-
chological terms he characterizes interpretation as an essentially social process,
one that “transforms our own inner life into a conscious interior conversation,
wherein we interpret ourselves”, a form of autocommunication (Lotman). And
from this position Royce ends up with the idea of a community of interpretation,
which obtains metaphysical dimensions in his thought when he comes to the idea
of the Hope of the Great Community. Whether semioticians form this kind of ideal
community of interpretation I am not sure. At the least, such a group is very con-
troversial and certainly not a unified community of interpretation. In Royce’s late
work, The Problem of Christianity (1913), Peirce’s impact is particularly strong; and
in his lectures on Metaphysics (1915–1916) he offered a synthesis of all his earlier
achievements (see Tarasti 2001).
One wonders why Welby and Royce had no contact with each other, as
Petrilli indicates was the case. Another notable lack is that Welby never mentions
John Ruskin in her writings, although he was certainly a well-known figure in
the contemporary British intellectual world, significant for his art-education
philosophies. Perhaps he was socially too radical for Welby, who never, it seems,
put her thoughts on ethics into a social program or critique – despite the fact that
she emphasized Significs as a practice rather than as speculation.
Be that as it may, let us return to the issue of how the idea of “Three” came to
these thinkers. It is evident that the concept of Three, used by Peirce, Royce and
others, existed long before them in the tradition of philosophical thought, and
that they only continued this type of academic discourse.
16.5 Welby’s independence as a scholar
Welby, however, as a vigorously independent scholar, almost an esprit contest-

ataire, argued that she discovered Three by her own reasoning. On November 18,
1903 she wrote the following to Peirce: “With regard to the relation between the
triad, [. . . ] that of Hegel (also that of Comte) I may say that long before I knew
anything about Hegel, I was asking myself, why my thinking when I tried to make
it clear, fell naturally into triads. Then I looked around and found more or less the
same tendency everywhere” (in Petrilli 2009: 291). So she thought “Three” to be
her own invention, but its occurrence elsewhere proved it to be a universal entity.
16.5 Welby’s independence as a scholar | 347
As a private thinker, she believed one could arrive at such a truth in one’s own way,
outside the academic tradition of philosophy. Peirce, when reviewing Welby’s
What Is Meaning? (1903), also considered one of its merits to be that “[. . . ] of
showing that there are three modes of meaning”.
On Welby’s independence of thought Petrilli has found other evidence as
well. This was seen as early as in Welby’s discussion of terminology. When
semantics was launched it had many rivals, including semasiology, sensifics,
significs, sematology, symbolonomy, and more. It showed courage to try to coin
a term for an entirely new discipline. Also the ways in which Welby dealt with,
among other things, the problem of Three showed her independence. In her essay
on “Threefold Laws” (1886) she had already reached this conclusion: “From the
study of development of human intelligence in all directions, and through all
times, the discovery arises of a great fundamental law [. . . ] the law is this: that
each of our leading conceptions [. . . ] passes through three different theoretical
conditions: the theological, or fictitious, the Metaphysical or abstract, and the
Scientific, or positive” (quoted in Petrilli 2009: 333).
Here Welby mentions as her model Auguste Comte’s law of three stages. Yet,
Welby continues to question:
Let us see then whether we can utilize Comte’s idea[. . . ]. Speaking Man passes through three
“phases of mind” which we may consider as 1) the Moral, the Logical and the philosophical,
or the Way of right conduct, right reasoning, and right generalization, 2) the Mathematical,
the critical the Scientific; or the Truth, abstract, historical, positive, and 3) the Vital, the
Energetic, the Generative, or the Life: sensuous, conscious, creative. In other words Man
mentally develops by a threefold process that is by the tentative, the corrective and the
effective.
(ibid.: 334)
Welby was very much occupied with Triads, as was Peirce, but she also warned:
“By this time the reader [. . . ] is suspecting a disguised version of Hegel. But al-
though Hegel is one of the most notable of thinkers who have ‘thought in threes’ he
is also one of the most dangerous of those who have allowed the idea to master and
to warp their whole mental world.” This was something Welby wanted to avoid.
But have we ever got rid of trichotomies? I recently sketched the development of
human societies via three stages: archaic (the mythical), historic (the sociosemi-
otical), and the contemporary globalized universe (the technosemiotical). Is this
not a new version of Comte?
16.6 Who is a significian?
Despite her caution, Welby divides her Significs into three parts: (1) Sense,
(2) Meaning, and (3) Significance. Welby, in defining these branches, describes
(1) “sense as the most primitive, and it occurs, for instance, when we ask “in what
sense” a word is used. For Welby the answer depends on the “essentially express-
ive element in all experience”, which is the organic response to the environment.
(It may seem that here is a foreshadowing of the biosemiotician’s notion of Wirken
as the primal response to the Umwelt.) The term “sense”, however, does not carry
the purport or intention of the speaker; therefore we use the term (2) “meaning”
to indicate the specific sense that something is intended to convey. This would
be the phase of modalities, or something similar to speech-act theory and its
illocution. Yet, the factor which transcends both of these previous definitions is
called implication, the ultimate result (perlocution) or outcome of the experience.
And for this we use the term (3) “significance”. For instance, we may say that an
event or phenomenon had a profound influence on his life, “the significance of
which cannot be overrated” (Hardwick 1977: 167). Significance is thus the broadest
of the three divisions.
Welby also speaks of a particular scholar or personality whom she calls a
“Significian”. This man has three attitudes: sense = verbal or “sensal”; meaning =
volitional; and significance = moral. (These resemble the three existential stages
of man, which Kierkegaard had already proposed.) Welby’s ideas clearly go far
beyond purely linguistic definitions, just as Greimas’s system would do later with
his invention of modalities, which exceeded the boundaries of verbal language
and made his semiotic theory a general one. Welby with her “system” also reaches
what Petrilli (as well as Deely 2001) call “semioethics”, something broached in my
Existential Semiotics as early 2000, which weighs the moral and ethical aspects of
signs. Another essential point in Welby’s thought, as mentioned above, was that
her Significs was a kind of practice of signs; it thus had a pragmatic dimension
leading to application, in education among other fields.
Can we see a deeper course or structure in Welby’s trichotomy? Can it be
considered a kind of generator of signification, a generative model? In existential-
semiotic terms, can we say that “sense” equates to pre-signs”? These last are signs
not yet fixed, as when we hesitate in our language use and ask, In what sense did
you use that word? We may then ask if “meaning” be taken as an act-sign, i.e.,
a sign used in the actual situation of communication in which we always want
to express something, such that we have intentions and modalities. Finally, is
“significance” not a kind of post-sign, which is a realized sign with all its social
and contextual impacts and consequences? It seems that Welby’s system may
be subsumed under the existential semiotic one; or into Roman Ingarden’s phe-
16.7 Problematic language | 349
nomenology, with its virtual, actual, and real phases – adopted by Greimas for his
virtualizing, actualizing, and realizing modalities.
When Petrilli “contextualizes” Welby’s thought into that of contemporary se-
miotics, she most often mentions, besides Peirce, thinkers like Bakhtin, Lévinas,
Ponzio, and Sebeok. But if Welby’s theory is interpreted in a “universal” man-
ner why not, to test its validity, insert it into other conceptual schemes as well?
Welby’s famous article on Significs, which appeared in the Encyclopedia Britan-
nica Vol. XXV in 1911, can be seen as an abridgment of much of her prior thought,
a summation of her most important results. Therefore Petrilli’s study is of vital
importance because it shows the broad discoursive field from which Welby’s ideas
stemmed.
16.7 Problematic language
Much of Welby’s thought deals with language, though essentially she saw lan-
guage as the origin of confusion and misunderstanding. Her relation to language
was thus ambiguous. On the one hand, she trusted language and considered or-
dinary colloquial speech, the common-sense language, as a determining factor.
She was also interested in diverse language uses, although not in the sense of
a Nancy Mitford and her theories of U-language (upper class expressions) and
non-U language. It does seem, however, that she anticipated what positivists later
called the “linguistic turn”. If such is the case, can we say that she fulfilled one cri-
terion by which some scholars are said to represent “Anglo-Analytic philosophy”?
Note, however, that there are two other criteria as well, one of which is the use of
formal logic. Peirce used it, but Welby not. In Petrilli’s book (2009: 355), the dia-
gram of literal and metaphorical meaning, though perhaps not formalized enough
to be taken as a logical scheme, shows how any expression balances between two
categories: actual/literal expression and figurative/metaphorical expression:
Figure 16.1: Literal and metaphorical meaning according to Welby

The third criterion of Anglo-Analytic philosophy, namely “the right philosophical

style”, may be harder to specify¹. Welby herself questioned naïve behaviorism and
empiricism, as the following lines from her poem “To A Discoverer in danger of
catching the new Specialism Disease” show:
. . . All else is an airy vapour, you know,

Though good in its place and way;
I can’t waste my time on irrelevant things
I care only to measure and weigh!
This may evoke for us the principle of an empirical scholar: try to measure what
is measurable . . . (as once expressed by the Estonian linguist Ilse Lehiste). The
end of the poem, which was written between the 1880s and 1890s, is even more
“existential”:
And see that while working at problems you love

The rest of your life isn’t spoiling!
On the other hand, Welby criticized language, such that “the bad use of language
implied the bad use of logic, incoherence and confusion in reasoning which de-
viated evolutionary development” (in Petrilli 2009: 29). Petrilli concludes: “She
invested the critics of language not only with the task of diagnosing the maladies
of language but also with the therapeutic power of recovering and reinvigorat-
ing linguistic expressivity” (ibid.). Heidegger went even further, holding language
guilty for the decline into das Man Sein with its inauthenticity and gossip. Welby
emphasized, as Petrilli puts it, “the need to improve our expressive devices, there-
fore language and communication generally, in order to avoid misunderstanding”
(ibid.: 99). Petrilli then concludes that Welby aimed for the improvement of inter-
personal relations and of human behavior in general. Petrilli states: “In the era
of global communication today nothing seems more real and concrete than the
prospect of global conflict and its many phases [. . . ]. Welby’s foresight is astound-
ing!” (ibid.) For me, this also calls to mind the American linguist Walburga von
Raffler-Engel and her theories of cross-cultural misunderstandings.
As more evidence of Welby’s semio-ethical concerns, we find her writing in
1902: “Significs affords also a means of calling attention to the backwardness of
language in comparison with other modes of human communication and to the
urgent need of stimulating thought by the creation of a general interest in the
logical and practical as well as the aesthetical value of all forms of expression”
(ibid.: 195).
1 I am indebted to Nathan Houser for sharing with me his ideas on Anglo-Analytic philosophy.
16.8 Metaphors | 351
16.8 Metaphors
Obviously Welby considered any ambiguity and figurativity in language as a vice

and a deficiency, as her view of metaphors reveals to us. In What Is Meaning?
(1903) her reflections came very close to Peirce’s ideas on iconic signs and index-
icality. But in contrast, Welby distinguished among cases: casual (or general) like-
ness, likeness in all but one point or feature, valid analogy (or equivalence), and
correspondence (reminiscent of Umberto Eco, on fakes and forgeries as corres-
pondence between two systems and their elements). Yet, going further such ana-
logies become metaphors that, in Welby’s view, should be abandoned. As soon
as we see a figure of speech, apparently so harmless, we should insist upon its
replacement by another which may turn out even worse still (Petrilli 2009: 368).
The use of metaphors brings us to the subject of ambiguity. Welby argues that
“voluntary and beneficial discord may be compared with intentional and bene-
ficial ambiguity”, and then herself makes a metaphor by music: “In one sense
discord may be described as the condition of true music, of which the essence is
significant and ordered harmony. So ambiguity [. . . ] is the condition of the highest
forms of expression” (ibid.). Greimas, in his way, put it that all witty speech de-
pends on complex isotopies; in rhetoric, we call this troping, i.e., the putting into
conflict of discordant figures. Welby continues: There are three forms of involun-
tary discord, all fatal to music: (1) defective tuning of the instrument, (2) defective
“ear for music”, and (3) defective larynx or lungs in singing, defective hands,
fingers and arms in the use of instruments, i.e., organic distortions. These cause
what we now call “noise” or disturbance in communication. Welby mostly refers
to corporeal qualities here (in Moi1, as I would put it), emphasizing different mo-
ments of musical communication. She then says, however, “But while intentional
discord is in music good, intentional discord in communication is always evil”.
Of this pernicious ambiguity she lists the cases: (1) We have defective “tuning” of
language. This means concretely that there should be a “perfect relation between
every element of Expression” (ibid.). Thus, claims Welby, we need to train a gen-
eration for this. (2) We have the defective mental ear and eye on the part of the
“performer”. (3) We have defective organs as instruments of expression. We even
say that this or that, a certain truth or reality, a certain beauty or good, is “indes-
cribable”, beyond one’s capacity to express.
16.9 How to educate our expressive powers
“The fact is that as children we have never had our Signific powers systemat-
ically trained, and thus our organs of significance are not yet fully developed.”
Obviously, Welby’s Significs is for her a project for developing our ability to dis-
cern subtleties of meaning. Hence she says in What is Meaning? that Significs is
linked to education because it would be considered first as a method of mental
training. But what did that mean in reality? To apply her own first category of
Significs we should ask, In what sense is she using the term “mental training”?
She answers in her essay “Linguistic Consciousness and Education” (1908): “Edu-
cation for meaning implies developing the capacity to identify distinctions and
to establish connections among different subjects, ideas, problematic fields of
research” (Petrilli’s paraphrase). The same applies to semiotics in general: it is
often said that the utility of all semiotics is precisely that it enables us to see
and recognize hitherto unknown connections. It means the same as programs
for school teaching. The difference is that nowadays semiotics in the classroom
treats of quite naïve and simple cases of signs, such as food, media, advertising,
and so on. Welby, however, speaks about more complex nuances of expression.
Altogether, for her significs was a “practical extension” of semiotics (Petrilli 2009:
272): “Significs concerns the practical mind, e.g. in business or political life, more
closely and inevitably than it does the speculative mind” (quoted in ibid.: 274).
Yet, it remains to ask what such a project would concretely imply. Is it similar to
Royce’s communities of interpretation – a new manner of looking at and interpret-
ing the world of our Dasein? Is it the same as Roland Barthes’s “structural man”
who deconstructs and reconstructs cultural objects?
16.10 Transcendence
On the other hand, Welby is not tied strictly to concrete reality since she takes
into account that which transcends our everyday experience: “That which ‘tran-
scends’ in any sense the ordinary limits of experience is often rightly enough re-
ferred to the vague, unknown, unsafe, unreal . . . ” (Petrilli 2009: 276). Still, her
transcendence is of a rather empirical kind, something which “the telescope and
spectroscope bring us”. Her mind is basically on the side of concrete facts. In
her early essays she was still pondering theological issues, but she later turned
them into practical questions and problems of language. When William James had
studied religion and published his treatise The Will to Believe (1897), Welby was
interested in a questionnaire of life in the future, when the issue of immortality
becomes a series of questions of the following type: “Would you prefer a) to live
after ‘death’ or b) not?” This type of research was of course one way to enact Sig-
nifics. The “I”, for Welby, was a kind of diagnostic activity: “We must be brought
up to take for granted that we are diagnosts [sic!], that we are to cultivate to the
utmost the power to see real distinctions and to read the signs, however faint,
16.10 Transcendence | 353
which reveal sense and meaning. Diagnosis may be called the typical process of
Significs as Translation is its typical form” (quoted in Petrilli 2009: 167).
In a letter to Peirce, dated November 20, 1904, Welby defined more closely
what she understood by transcendence:
The best I can do is to say I wish instead of the Future we could begin to talk of the Unreached
as the Yet distant! We do already talk of the near or distant future, and ‘future’ itself, like
all the time-words, is non-temporal. It is just Beyond Now, and the now is essentially here.
This gives the transcendent a new legitimacy. What we transcend is a garden-hedge or a
horizon; and you may go on transcending till you are back again at your own back-door! But
meanwhile the round world has moved on and dragged you, the transcendentalist, with it,
on a freshly transcendent expedition.
(Welby, quoted in Hardwick 1977: 40)
Needless to say, this rather strongly evokes my first model of existential semiotics,
with its transcendental “journeys” (Tarasti 2000; also 2009c). It also reminds one
of how sociologists Schütz and Luckmann define transcendence, in dealing with
the concrete and empirical matter of understanding (verstehende).
Thus, the seemingly rather utopian project of Significs and Significian can
take on such quite practical manifestations as diagnosis and translation. Welby’s
goal was indeed ambitious, as Petrilli describes it, in “her plan to develop and
adequate theoretical-linguistic apparatus in a significal key to review and re-
evaluate the history of the development of the human species and account for the
development of human behavior” (Petrilli 2009: 29).
Ultimately, Welby dealt with all the major philosophical questions relevant
to herself and to her environment. She also came to write about subjectivity and
difference among I, Me, and Self. In that sense she is extremely “modern”, per-
haps even au courant. Petrilli’s great work has rescued from oblivion an important
scholar of the past, a pioneer in the history of the semiotic movement, whose
thought provokes the most diverse interpretations. She ranks among the great
classics of semiotics although her Significs project never became part of main-
stream philosophy nor even within the scope of semiotics. She herself was a true
“significian” throughout her life, and much remains to be learned about her writ-
ings. Finally we have the access to the sources of Welby’s activities, thanks to
Petrilli’s years of devoted research.
Chapter 17
Vladimir Solovyov
17.1 Background
Vladimir Solovyov first came to my attention when the Finnish semiotician Henri
Broms wrote about him as a “myth-generating” philosopher who along with such
figures as Chaadaev and Berdyaev had played a crucial role in forming Russian
culture. Then my colleague Pekka Pesonen, Professor of Slavic Literature at Hel-
sinki University, informed me of certain texts by Solovyov that are accessible to
scholars who do not read Russian. There is an entire series of volumes of his works
in German, titled Deutsche Gesamtausgabe der Werke von Wladimir Solowjew.
The first of these volumes, the dictionary, includes Solovyov’s most essential
articles on philosophy, theology, and mysticism, taken from the Brockhaus-
Jefron Lexikon of the years 1891–1900. It is fascinating how the author can, in
the same book discuss such purely philosophical notions as Schein, causality,
Wissen, immanence, intuition, truth, ontology, objectivity, reason, space, ration-
alism; alongside such theological-mystical entities as pre-existence, will, eternity,
all-unity, ideal, idea, idol, metaphysics, mysticism; and also such historico-
philosophical and political terms as power, nationalism, patriotism, Western
identity, and the like. Familiar names appear, including those of Kant, Hegel,
Comte, Wilhelm Wundt, and Hartmann, along with names not so well-known to
the Western tradition, such as Valentinus, Pelagius, Gregorius Thaumaturgus,
Maximus the Confessor, Hermes Trismegistos; and finally such historians and
well-known Slavophiles in their time as Danilevsky and Léontine, aunt of Marcel
Proust. What appeals to us in this eclectic mixture is the kind of “structuralist”
attempt to create a global world-view. In this volume by Solovyov disparate
phenomena relate to each other on a spiritual basis that cannot be grasped
immediately, thus tempting one to read further.
I have even borrowed from Solovyov for my own system the ideas of “world
soul” and the Gnostic concept of “pleroma”, while knowing, however, that to pick
discrete terms by mere intuition may later prove to be problematic; for with them
come a whole system of thought which in the end can be something quite different
the one first imagined. After later reading Samuel D. Cioran’s book on Wladimir
Solov’ev and the Knighthood of the Divine Sophia (1977), it became clear to me that
the often long and rationally well-focused definitions in the dictionary showed
only one side of this thinker in whom also dwelt a “mystical Eastern man”, as
Henri Broms puts it. This aspect of the writer manifests as a poet and a scholar
who constructed a special doctrine of “sophiology”. As Nikolai Berdyaev has said,
17.1 Background | 355
there was the rational and reasonable daytime-philosopher Solovyov and the ir-
rational, “night-time” Solovyov with his mystic visions (cited in Cioran 1977: 39).
Whichever was the “real” Solovyov, he played a key role in the development
of nineteenth-century Russian culture. In addition to writing on general issues
of cultural policy and philosophy, Solovyov produced essays on the national
problem in Russia, which include such texts as “Über die Nationalität Rußlands”
(1884), “Die slawische Frage” (1884), “Rußland und Europa” (1888). In those
essays he turns out to be thoroughly different from the “Eastern” Solovyov who
adheres to Russian Messianism, Slavophilism, and Russia’s special commission
to proselytize Europe and the entire world. For example, “Die nationale Frage in
Rußland” begins impressively:
The national question is for many peoples the issue of existence. Russia cannot have such a
question. During its thousand-year history Russia has been a unified and independent great
power. This is the definite fact, which is beyond any questioning. But even more urgent is
the question: why and in whose name it exists. What is involved is not a material fact, but
an ideal destination. The national question in Russia is not a question of existence, but the
question of a dignified existence.
(Werke IV: 9, translation mine)
Solovyov later puts the matter quite frankly: Moral duty demands that a nation
give up its national egoism, conquer its national limitations, and transcend its
isolation. A nation has to conceive of itself as what it really is: a part of the unity of
the world. And it must experience solidarity with all the living parts of that unity.
This goal requires, in Solovyov’s view, an act that does away with national isola-
tion and egoism, and such an act is possible only if complete freedom of thought
prevails in Russia. This freedom is attainable only if one admits that Russia has
great and independent forces, which in order to manifest themselves must adapt
to more generally European forms of life and knowledge. He sharply rejects Slavo-
phile talk about the extra- and anti-European essence of Russia. Such artificial
originality has always been an empty demand. Unless Russia gives up the right of
power and begins to believe in the power of right, nothing good can follow. Only
by keeping in close touch with Europe has Russia attained anything significant.
The best in Russian culture is thus basically European: Pushkin and Lermontov
in literature, Sergei Ivanov in painting, and Glinka in music. Even of Glinka, the
first so-called “nationalist” Russian composer, it was said in his time he joined
the heart of Italian music with the brain of German music.
Now, a century later, Solovyov’s ideas are no longer of general interest. So-
lovyov does, however, enjoy currency in a science like semiotics. He is an integral
part of the nineteenth-century heritage, a great system builder in the manner of
Hegel, and also related to Kierkegaard, John Ruskin, and even to the later Charles
356 | 17 Vladimir Solovyov
S. Peirce. Could Solovyov be taken as a model for a post-structuralist semiotics

searching for its inspiration in philosophy? Does he belong to the semiotic tradi-
tion of thought? Did he ever use the concept of sign?
Solovyov’s system is clearly semiotic, in the deep sense that he believes in
the basic movement of the sign-reality, or sign-force, which designates the shift
from content towards expression, from the immanent towards the manifest, from
signified towards signifier. Indeed, behind his extremely rational philosophical
apparatus looms his complicated, sophiological-mystical vision, such that So-
lovyov to a modern man forms an almost incomprehensible blend of Orthodox
theology, theosophy, and poetic visitations. Yet, none of this changes the basic
structure of his thought, which is semiotic in the deeper sense mentioned above.
I link him with the tradition of “Romantic” semiotics, which starts from the fol-
lowing four hypotheses: (1) Meanings exist even before one starts to analyze and
explicate them (the hermeneutic principle of pre-understanding, Vorverständnis).
(2) Meanings are based upon processes; that is, they reveal themselves gradually
through the changes and developments of time, place, and subject. (3) They take
shape immanently, within a certain “system”. (4) They emerge from differences
within a system. Peirce’s life has certain commonalities with Solovyov’s: both
corresponded with women who understood their thought, and both mastered all
the fields of philosophy, from epistemology to ethics and aesthetics expressed.
Peirce illustrates the principle of “Romantic” semiotics in his essay “Evolutionary
love”, where he writes the following:
Suppose for example, that I have an idea that interests me. It is my creation. It is my
creature – it is a little person. I love it; I will sink myself into perfecting it. It is not by dealing
out cold justice to the circle of my ideas that I can make them grow, but by cherishing and
tending them as I would the flowers in my garden. This is the way mind develops; and as for
the cosmos, only so far as it yet is mind, and so has life, is it capable of further evolution.
(Peirce 1955: 363)
Moreover, Peirce situated the aforementioned principles of “Romantic semiotics”

in one category which he called “synechism”, defined as “that tendency of philo-
sophical thought which insists upon the idea of continuity as of prime importance
in philosophy and in particular, upon the necessity of hypotheses involving true
continuity” (ibid.: 354)
Nevertheless, most of the past century’s study of signs has been what we
call “classical” semiotics. Romanticism died upon the arrival of the Modernist
project. Yet one wonders if it is possible to revive the Romantic model now, early
in the twenty-first century. Postmodernism and post-structuralism have opened
the doors in this direction, and the further it progresses, the deeper semiotics
penetrates into hitherto unexplored realms. If the invention of modalities was in
the 1970s was considered revolutionary, now they are considered a sort of norm,
studied positively, and even quantified as computer units (see Tarasti 1995). The
modalities have since been followed with the idea of meta-modalities, which form
a relatively new and unexplored metaphysical realm. The Romantic semiotician
always exceeds the limits of Sameness, reaching out to Otherness and journeying
towards the unfamiliar.
It is from this perspective that Solovyov has pertinence today, that is, not
always by virtue of the content of his ideas, but by the style and aspirations of his
thinking. When one reads the purely rational definitions of his philosophy, they
display a certain strength and quietness of thought stemming from the conception
behind them. Of course one might doubt the wisdom of continuing to formulate
global systems now at the beginning of the twenty-first century, when the quantity
of knowledge from which to abstract a system has grown so enormously larger
than it was during the time of Solovyov and even of Peirce. But this need not be
a futile pursuit, so long as we remain conscious of the difference in our historical
situations and at the same time do not give up the principles we have; universality,
for instance, the four theses mentioned above, and Peircean synechism.
17.2 Moral philosophy
Solovyov’s collected papers include many heavy volumes of pure philosophy. The
earlier Solovyov is represented by Kritik der abstrakten Prinzipien (1877–1880; now
in Werke I), which deals with many problems inherited from Kant, Hegel, and
Schopenhauer, such as issues of the highest positive and abstract principles in
life, consciousness, and creativity. He first ponders ethics, then goes on to social
problems, the economic foundations of a society, and the concept of justice; next
comes religion, society as a religious union, and the dependence of ethics on
metaphysics. These reflections are followed by an epistemological section and the
definition of the very notion of knowing. He deals with naturalism, ontology, real-
ism, atomism, monism, empiricism, positivism, sensualism, and rationalism. The
last chapters of the Kritik hold special interest for our own existential semiotics,
in their allusion to issues engaged by Hegel, as discussed elsewhere in this book.
Among them, for example, are the following titles: “The difference between Being
and ‘To Be’ ” (Der Unterschied des Seienden vom Sein), “Being as the Absolute”
(Das Seiende als das Absolute), “Absolute Being and Absolute Becoming” (Das
Absolute Seiende und das Absolute Werdende), “Man as the second Absolute” (Der
Mensch als zweites Absolutes), and “Belief, imagination and creativity as the basic
elements of all objective knowledge” (Glaube, Einbildung und Schöpfertum als die
Grundelemente aller objektiven Erkenntnis).
His philosophical trajectory evokes that of Greimas, who once said that know-
ing consists only of islands in the sea of belief. Even Greimas elevated the modality
of Believing to the highest category. Solovyov shares with Peirce the centrality
of ethics, and other parallels between the two thinkers can also be found. For
instance, in a short paper from 1877, entitled “Three forces”, Solovyov states that
three basic dynamics have ruled over the history of mankind since its inception.
The first force endeavors to subordinate all grades and spheres of mankind to
some higher principle with which all the different and multiplied forms should be
fused. In its extreme form this means the dominance of one and the subordination
of others. A contrary principle is complete freedom in which the general becomes
abstract and where empty senselessness, egoism, and anarchy reign; this involves
a multiplicity of discrete elements without inner connections. Both of these forces
are negative in nature, and if they truly did rule over the development of mankind
then its history would amount to a mechanical oscillation between these two prin-
ciples. There is yet a third force, however, which joins the unity of the highest
principle to the free manifoldness of the discrete forms.
These principles of Solovyov correspond to the three species of development
portrayed above by Peirce: tychastic development, which means fortuitous vari-
ation (Solovyov’s second principle of multiplicity); anancastic evolution, which
designates a mechanical constraint or necessity (Solovyov’s first principle), and
agapastic evolution, which in Peirce means the same as “creative love”. The func-
tioning of these three principles in the cosmos was denoted by Peirce with the
terms tychism, anancism, and agapism.
Solovyov’s most extensive work is a large treatise entitled The Justification of
the Good (Werke V: Die Rechtfertigung des Guten: Eine Moralphilosophie), which
contains a thorough development of his ethics. According to Solovyov, morality
depends on determinism. The animal world follows mechanical necessity, or as
Peirce would say, “anancism”, the first species of determinism, which excludes
morality. The second species is psychological: it accepts certain elements but ex-
cludes others. The third species is rational-ideal, which gives place to all the de-
mands of the ethical.
According to Solovyov, all morality originates in the sense of shame. Shame-
lessness in a person reveals that the spiritual principle is not yet operating in him
(Soi ?). With the help of shame, people distinguish themselves from their animal-
istic nature. Man also has another emotion that serves as the origin of the ethical,
namely, compassion (Mitleid). The third emotion is respect (Ehrfurcht), devotion
and obeisance to something higher than oneself. This last constitutes so-called
natural religion and means that one respectfully loves something that is more
complete than oneself. The emotions of shame, compassion, and respect form
the basis of man’s relationship to that which is inferior to him, equal to him, and
superior to him¹. The mastery and domination of the material and the sensual,
solidarity with other living beings, and voluntary obeisance to a supra-human
principle comprise the foundation of ethics to Solovyov.
In the next chapter Solovyov ponders asceticism as an ethical principle. He
presents three forms of asceticism and states that in no doctrine is the evil, mater-
ial, physical world identified except in the Brahman concept of Vedanta, accord-
ing to which the world emerged through a fraud of the primal spirit. The world
appears as a deceptive difference, and by mortifying the flesh one can uncover
this fraud and attain unity. Another doctrine from India teaches that evil is proof
that spirit becomes a permanent ally with the primal materia, or nature. The third
kind of teaching is Buddhism, for which both spirit and matter are indifferent;
everything is empty; there are no objects of desire, and asceticism is reduced to
the simple modal state of not-Will. One can easily see what kind of implications
these concepts have for such classic semiotic concepts as the modalities.
Solovyov believes that we judge our role in worldly processes not only in re-
lation to concrete psychological phenomena but also in relation to the general
principle of dignified or undignified being (that is, good and evil). Such a con-
sciousness makes one participate in the goals of the process. Insofar as we allow
a good idea to direct our actions, we can positively participate in general life. But
because all this is realized in material nature, two principles fight within us: the
spiritual and the fleshly. The “fleshly” does not mean the physical organism as
such, but aspirations contrary to the spiritual soul that threaten to drown that
spirituality in materiality. In such a case, material nature appears as something
really evil, since it tries to destroy that which is dignified in human existence. The
concept of the fleshly ought not be confused with that of the corporeal, since phys-
ical bodies, even for an ascetic, can be “spiritual”, “transfigured”, “heavenly”,
and so on. Solovyov rejects all this, with the statement that good ascetics can
at the same time be cruel, evil-minded egoists. Asceticism in and of itself is not
essentially good and cannot alone constitute the highest ethical standard.
Next Solovyov scrutinizes the sense of general solidarity. he abandons the
Schopenhauerian philosophy of compassion, saying that man’s ability to feel em-
1 This distinction in social categories is the same as that developed much later by the Canadian
literary scholar Northrop Frye, in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957). In that book Frye distinguishes
among three narrative modes: the grotesque, in which the protagonists of the story are inferior
to us; the realistic, in which they are on the same level as we are; and the mythical, when the
protagonists are superior to us. In fact, many principles of narratology can be expanded into
philosophical ones; e.g., as we have done in this book with Greimas’s modalities. Perhaps such
principles were originally applications, abridgments, or fragments of philosophical categories
considered within our primary Dasein.
pathy with the suffering of a stranger seems to be enigmatic. It presupposes that

I have to some extent identified myself with the Other and have thus for a while
abolished the boundary between the I and the not-I. The state of general is a
mystery to Solovyov, and yet it is the secret of all ethics, something which reason
does not comprehend but still something quite ordinary. If one wishes to define
a semiotic act in terms of ethics, it would mean precisely the transition of the I to
the not-I. This process involves the emergence of difference, and at the same time
an identification with that difference. Everything that exists belongs to the same
unity, according to Solovyov; there is nowhere a complete discreteness. There-
fore Mitleid, compassion, is the sign of the inherent solidarity among everything
that exists. This state of affairs is considered entirely rational by Solovyov. Con-
versely, the irrational is alienation or subjective differentiation. Compassion does
not presuppose, however, that I completely identify with another creature but
that I remain non-identical with it; the boundaries between beings are not ab-
olished. When Solovyov says that compassion means I recognize in the other its
own meaning (Bedeutung; Werke V: 132), we are approaching near to semiotics.
From ethics, which is crucial to his overall philosophy, Solovyov turns to the
matter of virtues. For him, the good as an ideal norm of the will, or that which we
should want, does not coincide at all with the real object of the will, i.e., that which
we in reality desire. In its own way, good lays certain responsibilities on us, but
unfortunately (1) not everyone wants to take on their rightful obligations; (2) even
among those who seek after good not everyone is able to attain it, i.e., not all are
capable of mastering the bad inclinations of their nature; and (3) among those
few who have suppressed the evil within themselves, i.e., among the virtuous,
not even they with their goodness can overcome the evil that rules over the world.
This last-mentioned idea becomes central in Solovyov’s later philosophy, in which
he abandons himself to a Wagnerian apocalyptic vision of the final battle between
good and evil.
To comment on the essence of the good in a semiotic sense, one might offer
the following thesis: the only reward of a good act must be the act itself. Otherwise
we could not explain the fact that, generally speaking, the better we treat other
persons, the worse they become. This might sound pessimistic, but the positive
side of the matter is that goodness makes evil appear, and when evil manifests
itself openly it is easier to fight, and its effects can be remedied. In this way eth-
ics connects with our third principle of “Romantic” semiotics, namely that the
immanent becomes manifest.
In further writings Solovyov pays much attention to eudaemonism, to the fact
that everyone desires only his/her own good or pleasure. In such a view, life is
reduced to pleasure, according to Solovyov; but from this fact one cannot infer any
general rule for action. There is no general universal pleasure, but only various
kinds of pleasure which need have nothing in common with each other. In reality,
the idea of pleasure blends with the immeasurable chaos of fortuitous needs.
Erotic desire displaces every other desire. The supreme good from this standpoint
is a state that provides the greatest possible satisfaction. But this state is not just
the sum total of pleasures, because one must subtract from that total the sum
of unpleasant states. The highest pleasure is the one that produces maximal joy
and minimal suffering. In this case, moral choice would be based upon judging
between various alternatives.
This is not acceptable to Solovyov, because our destiny depends on many
factors that are not subject to our decisions or measurements. The destruction
of all good also casts a shadow over present enjoyment. Moreover, according to
Solovyov it is certain that the strongest enjoyments are not those recommended by
reason, but those which follow from wild passion. Neither do the highest spiritual
or aesthetic pleasures suffice as the greatest good, since the latter must must apply
to all people. No development of democratic institutions can endow a donkey with
the ability to enjoy the symphonies of Beethoven..
Solovyov next ponders utilitarian ethics, which claims that since we are not
only individuals but also part of a collective, we find real happiness only through
serving the common good. Nevertheless, utilitarianism, as represented J. S. Mill
and others, is but another form of eudaemonism. Utilitarianism only appears to
coincide with altruism. The utilitarian refers to the general solidarity, claiming
that the happiness of an individual is inextricably linked with the happiness of the
community. But according to Solovyov there exists a general solidarity that, like
a natural law, influences individuals regardless of their will and their behavior.
This general solidarity is not the same as the general welfare or common good.
For from the fact that humanity enjoys solidarity it does not follow that it would
be happy, since solidarity can obtain even amid disaster and destruction.
As a direct continuation of Solovyov’s rational philosophical reasoning, but
in literary form, his Drei Gespräche enacts a discussion between five different per-
sons who argue about the world situation, politics, war, and peace. This involves
a kind of Bakhtinian polyphony of consciousnesses whose contrapuntal parts
are these: the General, who has distinguished himself in battle; the Politician,
a resourceful man who is serving the state with his theoretical and practical in-
novations; the young Duke, a moralizing friend of the people who has published
more or less effective pamphlets about social problems; a middle-aged Lady who
is interested in everything human; and Mr. Z, whose age and social position are
unidentified (but who is revealed to be the alter ego of Solovyov himself). These
discussions, which resemble those in a Chekhov play, seem to take place in south-
ern Europe, since Solovyov describes the setting as a garden from which one can
see the Alps. The discussions meander from topic to topic as the protagonists
present their own experiences and tell long stories. Among other issues they dis-
pute the justification of war. Solovyov puts his own ethical positions in the mouths
of these personages. Little by little the discussion shifts to reflections on good and
evil. Among other things, Mr. Z says this:
It is now so that [. . . ] evil is obviously stronger than good; when this apparent fact is taken
as the only reality, one has to presume indeed, that the world is the creation of the evil
principle. But how is it then possible that in spite of the presence of evil, people argue that
there is no evil and therefore one does not need to fight against it? This is something my
reason does not comprehend.
(Werke VIII: 245, translation mine)
In what follows the central issue concerns how evil can masquerade as good. As
illustration, Mr. Z brings produces a manuscript written by a Russian monk; it is
a story about the Antichrist, which Mr. Z reads and the others comment on. The
Antichrist tale is a science-fiction sort of narrative about the future, when in the
twenty-first century (our very own) Europe is threatened by another Mongol inva-
sion. This threat causes the European nations to band together, or as the narrative
puts it: “Europe in the twenty-first century is a union of nations which are all ruled
more or less democratically”. The Antichrist is not a Mongolian Khan, however,
but a hero accepted by everyone. He seeks the ultimate good for mankind but does
so only out of infinite egoism. The task of this new superman is to bring salvation
to mankind via spirituality. He publishes a book on “The Man of the Future” in
which he promises eternal peace and prosperity. But a fight breaks out between
the Antichrist and Church fathers, and some people do not accept him as the
supreme leader. The final battle is waged in Jerusalem and involves mystical turns
of events in this fight over souls and not material goods. At this point, according
to Solovyov, mankind has already given up materialist thinking. If Solovyov lived
in our own time he probably would see traces of Antichrist everywhere and would
severely criticize postmodern society as a mixture of extreme eudaemonism and
fragmented dissolution, whereas for Peirce it would illustrate tychism.
17.3 Sophia and the World Soul
In his rationalistic, “daytime” output one must also include Solovyov’s theolo-
gical treatises, which advance a kind of theosophy, the doctrine he called “sophio-
logy”. They include lectures on God-head and manhood, as well as writings about
the unification of churches and the foundation of a universal theocracy. I will pass
over these, in order to get to his “night” side, or mystical aspect of his work. Such
writings influenced, among others, Russian symbolists such as Bely and Blok. At
the same time, they represent the strangest and most irrational side of Solovyov’s
personality.
I have not had access to a comprehensive biography of Solovyov, but some
sources mention an extensive treatise about him written by Prince Yevgeny Tru-
betskoy. My knowledge is thus based on the study by Samuel D. Cioran (1977).
According to Cioran, Solovyov tried to create a philosophical and rational basis for
Christianity. His aim was not purely theological, however; even more important
was the founding of his principle of Sophia. Sophia, argues Solovyov, is a rational
necessity, while at the same time appearing as a mystical mediation between the
divine and the earthly. Sophia is a mystical symbol of a rational process. It is inter-
esting to note that Solovyov’s highest principle was clearly a gendered creature:
a female. Sophia also appears in his texts under the title of the “Eternally Femin-
ine” and “Aphrodite Urania”. Sophia’s other-worldly guises are manifold; she is
identified with the concept of World Soul, Mother Earth, and Mother Nature.
Solovyov started from the texts of the Gnostic mystics. He believed that there
was a state of truth or an ultimate model from which humanity had strayed, and
in order to regain this state one had to return to the beginning of the cosmogenic
process. Wisdom could be obtained through its personification as Sophia. The
myth of Sophia itself is complicated. The originating cause of the universe is a
Monad, called the Father; unbegotten and imperishable, he is the source of all
that exists. Not subject to time or space, he is solitary and self-existing, reposing
within himself. In his solitariness he projects and conceives the dyad of Nous
and Aletheia (Mind and Truth). They in turn project the synergy of Zoe and Logos
(Life and Word), which produce Anthropos and Ecclesia (Man and Church). This
creation of pairs of Aeons continues until there are some twenty eight or thirty
Aeons in the Pleroma (fullness, plenitude). The youngest of these Aeons is called
Sophia. She decides, in imitation of the Father, to create an offspring without a
partner, but can only produce a formless substance, a shapeless and imperfect
mass. The rest of the Aeons become frightened by Sophia’s presumptuous deeds,
fearing that she might destroy the harmony of the Pleroma. The Father consoles
Sophia and orders a further projection through the synergy of Nous and Aletheia,
which produces Christ and the Holy Spirit (Cioran 1977: 18–19).
Solovyov’s cosmogony describes particular spheres in which these creatures
pursue their actions. The inferior physical world is under the power of the Demi-
urge, who believes himself to be its creator, whereas in fact Sophia is its original
cause. Nature and the physical world appear as the World Soul. Sophia is im-
movable, divine, eternal, whereas the World Soul is extra-divine and subject to
conditions of time and space. Sophia represents the non-contingent Queen of
Heaven, and the World Soul stands for the contingent and material body of the
natural world. The World Soul is materia prima, a freely operating spirit in the
extra-divine world; she is capable of desiring existence for herself outside of God,
of putting herself into a chaotic state of anarchy. Thus the content of the World
Soul represents nothing less than world history and world processes. The World
Soul does not appear as Sophia herself on earth, but rather as her potential spirit
or potentia1 agent. The closest Sophia comes to the World Soul is when the latter
unites with the Logos. In the action of the Logos, the active principle of Oneness,
Sophia makes herself known to the World Soul. United with the Logos, the World
Soul can progressively raise herself to identification with Sophia, an act which can
be consummated only at the end of cosmological history in the union of Heaven
and Earth.
The work of the World Soul culminates in the creation of man, the crown of the
world process and initiator of history. At the same time, the World Soul creates not
only man, with his masculine and feminine sides, but also mankind and society.
Born of the will of the World Soul and bearing the concealed divine principle, man
is the perfect son of two natures, one material, the other divine. Only man can
become the effective agent of Sophia on earth. By his rational acts he can make
the heavens descend to earth.
Sophia’s triple incarnation is described in Solovyov’s essay, “La Russie et
l’Église universelle” (published only in French). Sophia is also present in the
concept of earthly love, by which one can confirm the absolute value of another
human being outside oneself. Thus, Solovyov’s theory of love is based on the
polarity of the male and female principles; hence gay and lesbian relationships
have no place in it.
Behind this quite extraordinary theoretical construction stands the person-
ality of Solovyov, which we should like to know more about. Solovyov was an
extremely delicate and nervous character. he was often sick and feverish, and
during bouts of illness he became particularly susceptible to visions and hallu-
cinations. He could sit for hours in the library of the British Museum in London,
looking at one page of the Kabbalah. When asked what was so interesting about
it, he replied, “In a single line of this book there is more intelligence than in all of
European science” (quoted in Cioran 1977: 41). One Russian intellectual has said
that Solovyov revealed his inner visions only to women, claiming that at the most
important junctures of his life he followed the directions of the spirit of a certain
Norman woman of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, who appeared to him
whenever he wished.
The person who best knew the hidden side of his life was his brother, Mikhail
Solovyov. In the private papers and correspondence of his brother, Mikhail found
such incredible and scandalous material that he had to destroy it in order to sus-
tain the intellectual and moral reputation of Vladimir. One aspect of Solovyov’s
life came to light only some years after his death, in the memoirs of writer Nikolai
Valentinov, entitled Two Years with the Symbolists. Upon discovering many intim-
ate love letters signed with the letter S, Valentinov declared Solovyov a mentally
unbalanced pervert. Solovyov clearly meant these letters to be read as coming
from Sophia (S), but the handwriting reveal that they were written by Solovyov.
This is not so extraordinary given that Solovyov was practicing the so-called auto-
matic writing later favored by the surrealists, whereby he would jot down tele-
pathic messages purportedly delivered from other realms.
Solovyov’s irrational views are best conveyed by his poems, the most famous
of which is Three Meetings (Tri svidaniya) from 1898. There Sophia appears in
three forms: (1) as the perfect archetype who moves freely between the heavenly
and earthly worlds; (2) the World Soul, or nature, the feminine principle of matter,
which can receive the Logos and thus become divine; (3) the earthly woman, the
feminine complement of the masculine principle, the union of which produces
society.
This poem, according to Solovyov, humorously depicts the most important
events of his life. Its style oscillates between farce and profound revelation. Ac-
cording to the poet, Sophia first appeared to him in 1862, when he was nine years
old. She manifested as “earthly love” and did so in a church sanctuary, possibly
during evening service amid the intoxicating incense, icons, and music that set
the stage for spirit apparitions. The second visitation of Sophia occurred thirteen
years later when Solovyov, then a young university lecturer, left home to pursue
studies at the British Museum. Lastly Sophia appeared to him in the Egyptian
desert, bidding him to join her there. Solovyov immediately quit work in London
and traveled to Cairo via Paris, without stopping en route. He satirically describes
the Cairo Hotel, with its Russian and other foreign clientele, as well as himself
wandering about in the desert, dressed elegantly in top hat and overcoat. He is
attacked by Bedouins, released, then finds himself alone in the night among the
jackals. In despair he receives his third vision, for which the first two were but
preparation.
In these poems Sophia never appears under her own name but is addressed
as “thou” or “eternal friend” or “Queen”. As the feminine nature principle she is
called “Earth-Mistress”. The last-mentioned variant might interest semioticians
who have attended conferences at Imatra in Finland, since the latter town appears
in Solovyov’s poems about Lake Saimaa, where he often went for meditation. In
the poems “Saimaa” and “On Saimaa in winter”, both dating from the year 1894,
this lake acts as a synonym for World Soul:
The lake splashes with impatient waves. Like the swelling tide in the sea, The disharmonious
element surges towards something, Contends with something, a hostile fate.
That toward which the lake surges is unity and identification with Sophia. Images
of water in Solovyov’s poetry depict the unbounded nature of the World Soul,
which in its restless motion reveals the struggle for unity.
In “On Saimaa in winter”, the World Soul receives its most poetical names,
such as “the radiant daughter of sombre chaos”. In it Sophia plays the role of
World Soul, appearing as Finnish nature in winter:
“You are all enveloped in luxuriant fur, Becalmed you lie in unresisting sleep.
The radiant air does not waft of death here, This transparent, white silence.
In serene and profound repose,
No, I did not seek you out in vain.
Your image is the same before the inner eye, Fairy-Mistress of the pines and rocks.
You are unsullied like snow beyond the mountains,
You are full of thought like the winter night. You are all in rays, like polar flame,
Radiant daughter of sombre chaos!”
A mystery of Solovyov’s life, one which particularly influenced Bely, Blok, and
other Symbolists, was his relationship with a woman named Anna Nikolaevna
Schmidt. She lived in Nizhny Novgorod and did not get to know Solovyov and his
philosophy until the last months of his life. Unmarried and living with her sick
mother, she was believed to be an incarnation of Sophia. Schmidt had written
things similar to those of Solovyov, but without ever knowing about him; e.g.,
her text “On the present-day life of Margarita”. She claimed to have been reborn
twice on earth, first bodily and then spiritually. Solovyov and Anna Schmidt met
only once, in April 1900. Schmidt sent Solovyov about thirty letters altogether,
only seven of which have been preserved. Hence their correspondence cannot be
compared to that between Charles S. Peirce and Victoria Lady Welby, which we
examined here in the chapters on those two thinkers.
ln the end, what can we make of Vladimir Solovyov as a pre-semiotician?
To take him as such, we would have to interpret “semiotics” more broadly than
linguistics-based theories would do. Mystical, “Eastern man” though he was,
most of his output was Hegelian and rationalistic. Obviously he saw no conflict
between his mystical doctrine of Sophia and his other philosophical construc-
tions. Solovyov remains a part of the forgotten nineteenth-century heritage,
which brought to light many ideas and issues that the twentieth-century later
took as its own creations.
Chapter 18
Russian formalism in the global semiotics –
Precursor of the European branch
18.1 Introduction
There is no doubt that the complex and rich phenomenon of what is called Russian
formalism belongs to the very special cultural heritage of the whole international
semiotic movement. This means that it is something to be remembered, to be
returned to in order to understand what happened later. In fact, in the West it has
undergone the same fate as other semiotic schools and groupings, namely that
only individual scholars dive up, they are reprinted and even worshipped as big
gurus, but then often ignoring their original context. That is what has happened
most typically to Mikhail Bakhtin, for instance.
Yet, when we explore deeper the history of semiotics, we notice how many
of its central notions are just stemming from those years named under Russian
formalism. So it is high time to show gratitude to that period, one of the most
creative but also controversial of the discipline. One should, of course, not focus
in such topics without competence in Russian language. Historical study of wie
es eigentlich gewesen ist remains more or less superficial without the reading of
original sources. Yet, it may also reflect the reception of its ideas in a new and
maybe broader context. Thinking of great figures of semiotics the same happened
also with French and Italian scholars in the Anglo-Saxon world. We once had a
talk about Roland Barthes and how his reception started in the UK. Personally
I have to admit then that my knowledge on Russian sources, albeit very import-
ant for me, has depended on various translations. In the case of Finland there
might be even more justification for this approach taking into account the tiny
role Finnish academic life may have exercised on Russian formalism. My report
here starts therefore with these origins, in spite of possible misunderstandings
and misinterpretations.
So I am lead and obliged by the topics itself to establish the scholar’s position
first and go back to the early 1970s. Yet, that is also the time when several Russian
formalists started their triumph in the West. Now every anthology or encyclopae-
dia of the history of semiotics must contain a chapter on Russian formalism. How-
ever, the first problem we encounter here is how to define the phenomenon and
how to distinguish it from other cultural phenomena of the period, i.e., the 1910s
and 1920s. Certainly, it is one of the fascinations of the thing that it is hard to say
whether it belongs to science or art. Who was then, after all, a Russian formalist?
368 | 18 Russian formalism in the global semiotics – Precursor of the European branch
Yet, the first time we read as young students about scholars like Propp,
Šklovsky, Tynianov, Eichenbaum, Tomashevsky, Jakobson, Bakhtin was due to
a Swedish anthology Form och struktur by Kurt Aspelin and Bengt A. Lundberg,
(Litteraturvetenskapliga texter I urval, 1971). It contained translations of classic
essays by Šklovsky on artistic devices, by Tynianov on literary evolution, and
Eichenbaum on Gogol’s novel. Quite naturally the book then moved from this
origin to Mukařovský, then to French structuralism, and ultimately to Yuri Lot-
man. You note in Finland we are bilingual, so the whole semiotics started in
my country by a young student group, which called itself a ‘structuralist group’
and was unable to read French, Italian or Russian and therefore resorted also,
as to Umberto Eco and his La struttura assente, to the Swedish translations Den
frånvarande strukturen. After this promising beginning in Sweden, until recent
years, they did not continue semiotics so energetically as in the neighbouring
countries Denmark and Finland.
Anyway, these classical texts fascinated us. The next time I heard about Rus-
sian formalism was in the introduction to semiotics a course offered at the Depart-
ment of Folkloristics at Helsinki University by Professor Vilmos Voigt. This course
for the first time told about the sources in St. Petersburg or Leningrad and Moscow
and also revealed the role the Finnish folklore studies had in Propp’s theorizing.
What was involved was the classification method of fairy tales and folk songs by
the brothers Krohn and the primary school teacher Antti Aarne. This was first time
I heard about these Finnish scholars. Five years later in Brazil where I left as a
student of Lévi-Strauss, I found a book entitled Inteligência do Folclore by Renato
Almeida which had, to my surprise, a whole chapter on Escola finlandesa. This
source and Prof. Voigt showed how important a role these Finnish scholars played
for Propp when he was writing his Morfologiya skazki. Later I used to mention
this often until my colleague from Petersburg wrote me that I was wrong and
that Propp elaborated his model independently. I believed in him but now this
problem got back to my mind and I wrote to Prof. Voigt who again emphasized
this connection.
Later, it became clear that this was just the origin of a discipline called nar-
ratology, a branch of semiotics. In the 1980s when I visited and lectured at Musée
de l’Homme in Paris, in the seminar by Prof. Gilbert Rouget, I could notice that
the only authors the French anthropologists knew about Finland were just the
dissertations by Krohn brothers, in the turn of century, once published in German.
Another aspect which attracted in Russian formalism was its artistic con-
nection. It was obviously also an artistic practice, and not only the one perse-
cuted later in the 1930s under Ždanov time in music, in the criticism against
Shostakovich, Khachaturian and Prokofiev, but an aesthetic standpoint linked
to the emergence of modernism. One could link such world class artists like
18.2 Wassily Kandinsky | 369
Mayakovsky, Stravinsky and Eisenstein to it. I remember I saw sometime in 1972

at the Helsinki Festival a Russian movie from the 1920s about a young movie
director in Moscow from whom a British impresario had commissioned a film on
new life in Moscow. The young hero did it with his girlfriend. Then it was shown to
the impresario; there were scenes of progress in Russia, children going to school,
new buildings, etc. But in every montage the girlfriend was put in the foreground
so that her pretty figure covered all the rest. The impresario got furious: I did not
order a film of your girlfriend he shouted. No, but she was only a priem , an artistic
device, the young man defended. So this was for me a proof that the vocabulary
of Russian formalism had really intruded the artistic creation in those years.
18.2 Wassily Kandinsky
Another figure which became familiar was Kandinsky. I could not imagine more
‘formalist’ a book as his Punkt und Linie zu Fläche, albeit written later in the 1920s.
I found it in Paris as a French translation Point, Ligne et Plan. His effort to create
a universal grammar of all the arts, based on correspondences of colours, forms,
sounds sounded truly ‘structuralist’ but resonated also from the Scriabinesque
symbolism.
Later having seen an exposition of Kandinsky I read in the anthology that, in
fact, Kandinsky was originally a folklorist and ethnologue who travelled among
the Zyrians (syrjäänit, a Finno-Ugrian tribe), wrote about their archaic life, painted
and made drawings on their figures, costumes, houses, artworks, and copied es-
pecially their abstract ornamentations. This happened in 1889 at Vologda region
habited by the Zyrians. In Moscow Ethnographic Society in 1888 he had already
delivered a lecture on the beliefs of Perms and Zyrians. Kandinsky was aware
also of the Finno-Ugric origin of his name stemming from River Konda area and
the word konda meaning ‘honka’, a fur tree in Finnish. Several specialists of art
history have said that the Finno-Ugrian ornamentation was the first impulse to
Kandinsky’s non-figurative art. His correspondence with A. Schönberg illumin-
ates also his visions on the artistic form. To me all this sounded truly ‘formalist’,
but in encyclopaedias in vain I try to find his name in the histories of Russian
formalism. Instead, Malevich and suprematism are often mentioned alongside
Jakobson. Kandinsky’s view of the form was dynamic; it was based upon inner
tensions of the art work. This view then was shared in musicology by Boris Asafiev
in his intonation theory which was soon in the 1970s discovered to be a pioneer of
musical semiotics.
The new issue in all this, compared to earlier theories, was to see the import-
ant point in the text itself neither in the mind of a genius creating the art work
Figure 18.1: A non-figurative painting by Kandinsky from 1913, from which the emergence
of Russian formalism is counted
nor at receiver’s side. So, essentially the whole epistemic movement was anti-
psychological by its nature. It tried to base the aesthetic analysis on the object
and its structure. It was hostile to any hermeneutic program or poetry linked to
arts. It was the new objective scientific spirit of exactness which was underlined.
Stravinsky’s musical poetics later was characterized by the same spirit of anti-
psychological nature: He did not see a reflection of any psychic content in music,
as he said in his lectures at Harvard. This was certainly a formalist attitude. When
Boris Gasparov visited our structuralist group in Helsinki around 1973 he emphas-
ized however that this asemantic or antisemantic approach was in fact only the
minus side of the primary semantic nature of music. The same was stated by the
French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch when speaking of Prokofiev and calling
his style ‘espressivo inexpressif’. This meant that the asemanticity was a certain
historic phase in style evolution and not a synchronically valid universal truth.
However, Stravinsky could then be situated in the tradition of formalist aesthetics
stemming in music from Eduard Hanslick in his essay Vom musikalisch Schönem
(1854) and continued even by Lévi-Strauss who claimed that La musique, c’est le
langage moin le sens. Morpurgo-Tagliabue in his L’Esthétique contemporaine spoke
about formalism in general as a line of the 20th century aesthetics and then mean-
ing by it a larger phenomenon than just Russian formalism. What is the relation
of this type of formalism in general in the arts – and the Russian formalism –
Figure 18.2: Kandinsky’s ethnographic studies of the Zyrians (Finno-Ugrian tribe ‘syrjäänit’)
around 1887
is an interesting question. Certainly the roots of Russian formalism especially in

St. Petersburg lay in the modernism like symbolism and futurism. Andrei Bely
with his original theories on symbols and novels. There is a nice passage in the
novel The Way of Sufferings by Alexei Tolstoi portraying a salon in St. Petersburg
where Scriabin is played and in the walls listeners are looked at by radically dis-
torted futurist paintings. This was the Zeitgeist.
18.3 Its key concepts are metaphors from music
However, if I have been much dwelling in the musical field here, this may have
its legitimization in the theories of Russian formalists themselves. Namely, most
of them coined their new concepts as metaphors from musical practices. I do not
know if attention has been much paid upon this fact so far.
Roman Jakobson and his dominant. It is one of the most central notions of
formalist theory, it is defined as the integrating factor of an art work, which leads,
determines, and transforms other components of the work. It could be a principle
within the art work, a system of rhyme, or it could appear in the canon of poetic
norms of certain literary trend. For instance in renaissance period pictural arts
were dominating others. In romanticism it was music which was central. It had
its impact on the evolution of genres when the emphasis or dominant was shifted
from one genre to another.
Šklovsky and estrangement. The concept of estrangement was not just of
musical origin although Verfremdung was central idea of Bertolt Brecht and in the
music at his ‘epic theater’ from the same years. The alienation as an artistic device
was strong in a novel like Master and Marguerite by Bulgakov. Alienation as break-
ing the automatisms became essential in the semiotic aesthetics of Umberto Eco,
as well. I wrote in 1972 some lines about estrangement as an artistic device in my
note book:
“The concept of estrangement in the arts is very essential. What is then involved is the vari-
ation of the distance between man and aesthetic reality. The ability of an artist to move us, to
have an impact on us, is just based upon these consciously planned judgements and control
of this distance. There are art works which do not longer make any effect because they are
too close to that reality from which they are stemming. The tendence art emanating from an
actual political situation is just like that. Yet, to the same class belongs also the art which
operates on a purely psychological and individual level – great books of ‘confession’ which
mostly make the same impression on audience as a person penetrating to our company by
force. Aesthetic reality exists as such appearing a.o. in art works. Nevertheless, what is the
relationship of man to this reality? Does the man himself still live in this reality, or only at it,
on the borderline of it, or then so far, at such distance that there is no longer any touch. On
the other hand, how this law of distance, which rules over the experiential semantic con-
ception of art, looms already in the semantic structure of an art work as its crucial variable.
Then it can be paralleled to intensity. The intensity of a work varies according to at which
distance the creator of an art work situates the recipient, which ‘position’ he/she is forced to
assume. This holds true for ‘old art’. Contemporary art (painting, literature, atonal music)
allows to the receiver of art a creative freedom just on this self-estrangement dimension. As
in a microscope one gets always new miracles visible, in the same way an art work reveals
from its hidden parts many kinds of structures. Previous structure disappears when a new
enlargement foregrounds a new one. Such is in fact analysis of art, a kind of microscopic
study. Two aesthetics which scrutinize the same object, art work through different enlarge-
ments, see there different issues and also talk about different things.”
This was in the 1970s, but now we note how Adorno spoke in his aesthetics exactly
in similar manner of distance in the arts (then I did not know yet his theory).
Yet, in the contemporary art it is not difficult to find other illustrations for
estrangements which has its permanent place in the avant-garde technics. Let
us quickly look at opera stagings and videos, one fashionable, almost unavoid-
able genre mixture of contemporary stagings, one variant of that Regietheater in
which the stage director builds his own work upon the original. I know no case in
which video and film would have been successfully mixed with the performance
of opera. Of these two genres certainly authentic opera performance is stronger
than its filmed version. If you were asked whether you like to see La Scala or
Metropolitan or Mariinsky ‘real’ version of an opera, or its filmed one , I think most
would choose the real one. Yet, the filmed opera has become its own genre which
was first separated from the original. So one could go to movies to Bergman’s
Magic Flute or Zeffirelli’s Don Giovanni. In film in a case like The Umbrelllas of
Cherbourg the singing serves as a particular estrangement technics. But then the
video penetrates inside the opera, as a kind of representation of representation
(theater is of course always that as Ivo Osolsobě once said!).
Can video then serve as an ‘ostranenie’? Yes, to some extent and at the begin-
ning. By its force it definitely wins over the stage performance, singers are put in
the background. Let us think of Harry Kupfer’s Parsifal and its Blumenmädchen
scene with slightly pornographic films replacing the real quire on stage (Wolfgang
Wagner with whom I saw it once in Helsinki, did not like it). But when it becomes
mannerism it fails. Peter Sellars’s version of Tristan with continuous video films
with other actors than the real singers completely draws the attention from them
and destroys live performance. In Andriy Zholdak’s radical version of Yevgeny
Onegin (Savonlinna Festival, July 2013), the video takes 2/3 of the stage, and the
opera appears there as an almost ‘normal’ staging. Yet, one third of stage is in
real action with same singers as on video, but grotesquely distorted representing
obviously the Tchaikovskyan subconscious, i.e., making visible what actors really
think of all. So Olga and Tatyana are modern teenage girls, kissing each other, Jev-
geni occurs always as an animally erotic object in a 19th century swimming dress,
etc. Screen is also one second belated from the real performance, all the time. Es-
trangement has reached an extreme point. Yet, video loses its power totally when
the singers video film each other and see themselves as represented by it. This
new mannerism putting singers standing there with a camera or mobile phone
with Facebook all the time at hand is no longer estrangement but the contrary: if
the original idea was to break the automatism of everyday life, now it brings the
stage reality back to our daily experiences. Distance between stage and spectat-
ors shrinks, and all this at the cost of finer subtleties and real meanings of the
composer, music, singers, orchestra and all. The stage has become a narcissist
reflection of the modern spectator, the popular commercial mass media culture
with all forms of the symbolic violence which has intruded into art. Why should
we go to opera to see there only the perpetual continuation of the everyday life?
Opera is no longer getting us familiar with the knowledge of the Other. All belongs
to the Same. This is the end of the ostranenie.
Mikhail Bakhtin and his idea on Dostoevsky’s ‘polyphony of conscious-
nesses’; Bakhtin says that Dostoevsky as a writer is distinguished by a particular
ability to perceive simultaneous, contradictory, conflicting elements, not continu-
ous developments like Goethe but like a five part fugue in which parts alternate
and develop in a counterpoint and harmony, this is the particular voice-leading
technique of Dostoevsky. Bakhtin quotes Grossman who speaks of modulation
at Dostoevsky. (Later also Greimas and Fontanille speak in their semiotics of
modulations of passions!) Mikhail Glinka is also quoted when he said: All in life
is counterpoint – and this Bakhtin interprets that all in life is dialogue, based on
dialogical opposition. In fact, even musical counterpoint is then an application
of the dialogical principle (I tried to show the same three years ago in my speech
on Dialogical Self at Cambridge University, organized by a research group of
psychotherapists and psychologists using Bakhtin as their foundation; you only
need to play some fugues of Bach and show how he puts subject and response into
a dramatic conflict [like in F sharp major fugue of Das Wohltemperierte Klavier I]
and lets at the end the response ‘win’ the main subject!). Then nothing is more
avoidable than monologue, one speaking subject. (This I noticed concretely in the
aforementioned congress when one morning I went early to the breakfast room in
order to enjoy it just alone and peacefully. Having chosen the utmost corner of the
hall, quickly people started to gather around me with their lively talk; later I no-
ticed they were all Bakhtinian psychotherapists who thought I was an alienated
person who needed dialogue – although that was just what I wanted to escape!)
Yuri Tynianov and his ‘orchestration of poetry’, this means a poet says
things due to phonetics letting the innovations on this level hurt against the
semantics. If I utter you in Finnish a verse: Porkkanan oranssi sokaisi, you receive
it as a phonetic ‘music’ by the mere sounds of the vowels. But its meaning is
nonsensical: ‘The orange of a carrot blinded one’.
Tynianov had as well reflections on genre which hold true as well for music
as for literature. His essential idea is how we recognize a genre, how we identify
it. To which extent poem is a poem and now some other text. If I say Il pleut à Paris
it is a statement. But if I continue Il pleure dans mon cœur, it is poetry by Verlaine,
following Klinkenberg). If I say: Put the tiger in tank, it is certainly advertisement,
but of course could be a part of collage poetry. If I say Wer nur die Sehnsucht kennt,
weiß was ich leide or Kennst du das Land wo die Zitronen blühn, they are obviously
poems by the mere order of the words. What Tynianov wrote about genre shifts,
changes, dissolutions is close to Asafiev, namely what he said at the same time
of musical genres and their development. Yet, Asafiev was even more semiotic
since for him the signified was primary. When the emotional content changed it
needed new musical signifiers, and this caused the so-called ‘intonation crisis’.
On the other hand, later formalists, in Prague circle days, stated that the relation-
ship between changing society and arts was not a causal one but symbolic, sign
relationship, and this was of course against the official Widerspiegelung theory.
Žirmunsky and his treatise on metrics and versification; my hypothesis was
that Igor Stravinsky in his Oedipus Rex applied Žirmunskian ideas to the musical
versification of Latin language chosen by the composer because it could be tested
as pure phonetic material devoid of semantic connotations. I thought that this
was possible for Stravinsky only after his emigration in his neoclassical period
(Tarasti 1979).
Of Žirmunsky as such we know his efforts for a comparative typology; his bio-
and bibliography were published in 1962 (140 pages), his Festschrift in 1964 on the
problem of comparative philology, and among his own books studies on Goethe in
Russia, Central Asian Epos, Theoretical Problems of National Epos (on the origin
of Kalevala, a view criticizing Krohn). Žirmunsky also wrote about limitations
of formalism in the 1920s even before it was officially abolished by Ždanov visit
to Leningrad University in 1947. Yet in Moscow slavist congress the comparative
study was rehabilitated. Žirmunsky was at the end of 1950s against phonology, al-
though he studied it himself; and in the beginning of 1960s against structuralism,
albeit he used it much himself in his metric interpretations (for this information I
am indebted to Vilmos Voigt).
Boris Tomashevsky and several concepts in his essay “The Structure of Plot”
(which I have read as Finnish translation in the anthology Venäläinen formalis-
mi, edited by Pekka Pesonen and Timo Suni) Tomashevsky presents a systematic
vocabulary to study narratives launching concepts like theme, fabula, subject,
tension, motif, exposition, time, space, kinetic space, estrangement (ostranenie),
canonic and free devices, parodies . . . all these notions are relevant also for music
and, say, for musical narrativity. Yet, when transplanting them back to musical
field one has to be careful since many of them are defined and used somehow
differently when applied to music, like the first one: ‘theme’. In a novel theme is
the basic issue, what the story is all about, like The Last Days of Pompeii, love story
of Anna and Vronsky, society of learned men in Hesse, development of one young
man like in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister. However, in music theme is a particular
unit of musical discourse, in tonal music characterized by certain length, clear-
cut harmonic basis, clearly melodic formula, etc.
In fact, I already sketched an essay in which Tomashevsky’s approach was
‘musicalized’ and another one in which completely traditional music theoretical
study of symphony or sonata by such composer like J. Brahms will be semiot-
ized showing his narrative structure; this will concern a perfectly absolute mu-
sic without any programs. I was inspired by a study on Brahms symphonies by
my colleague Erkki Salmenhaara from 1978 which I studied for my speeches at

the Mariinsky Summer Festival led by Valery Gergiev in Finland, having several
Brahms symphonies in their program!
In Salmenhaara’s view all the Viennese classical symphonic music (i.e.,
symphonies, sonatas, string quartets and other chamber music pieces with larger
forms) could be classified as to the key architecture with the following diagram.
There were only a few basic types which were used by great composers. Most
common was the tonic type (in major indicated by T and in minor t) The most
common is the use of subdominant in the side movement, type is TS. Also very
common is tonic-dominant-tonic. Both these types constitute the major symphony
type. In minor they are rare, and as known in the minor as a contrasting tonality
serves most often the parallel major type tP; next big group is formed by key
relations which Salmenhaara calls modal parallel, i.e., in major the major side key
situated at the distance of major or minor third (both upwards and downwards).
Theoretical possibilities are thus if the key is C major in this TPm type as follows:
C A C, C as C, C E C, C es C. Also modal minor parallels of type Tpm appear, but
more seldom. In minor a modal parallel solution (parallel key being almost always
major of type: tPm is as common as parallel major).
I wanted to cite this because in that scheme we have in musical terms some-
thing similar to Tomashevsky’s classification of the narrative technics or Vladimir
Propp’s study on the morphology of the folktale. Here we only talk about symphon-
ies and sonatas instead of novels or fairy tales. The key distinctions are not only
abstract spatial relations in the inner tonal space but they are already semantically
loaded. Even the choice of a key is not at all arbitrary. Let us say: anyone writing
in E flat major after Beethoven Eroica must face the heroic character of this key.
Everyone writing in F major must remember its pastoral quality (Beethoven’s Sixth
“Pastoral” Symphony in F major), anyone using D minor must recall Mozart’s Don
Giovanni and D Minor Piano Concerto. So the historic character of a key could be
created by one single work. In the time of Russian formalism also the synaesthesic
meanings of keys were discussed by artists: Kandinsky portrayed different angles
with various colors, Rimsky-Korsakov and Scriabin had their diagrams of corres-
pondences of keys and colors. Individual composers thought of keys in terms of
colours. For Sibelius the combination of orange, red and black was D major.
Anyway, the classification evokes the idea of the basic theme of each story,
whether it goes from ‘sad’ minor to ‘victorious’ major, whether it starts and ends
happily but has excursion (shifting off, débrayages!) into darker fields. The global
plan of a work is just its symphonic structure strengthened by thematic (actorial)
and motivic elements on more superficial levels of the work. However, just as
Propp came to 31 basic functions of Russian fairy tale here we can see 58 types of
symphonic literature. Just as a fairy tale teller can choose from the ideal repertoire
Type T Type TSp

CC CFaC
CCC
CCCC Type t
CcC aA
CcCC aAa
CCcC aaAa
aAaa
Type TS
CFC Type tP
CFCC aCa
CCFC aCaa
CFcC aCA
CFCc aCaA
aCAa
Type TD
CGC Type tPm
CGCC aFa
CCGC aFaa
CGCc aFaA
aaFA
Type Tp aaFaA
CaC aFaa
CaCC aFAa
CCaC aCa
CacC
Exceptional types
Type TPm CcE#AFC
CAC aAF(D)Aa(A)
CCAC aB(g)FCea
CA#CC CgC
CCA#C
CcA#C
CA#C
CEC
Type Tpm
CeC
CCgC
Figure 18.3: Key relationships in
Type N
Viennese-classical symphonies
CCC according to Salmenhaara 1979: 26
what he wants to foreground similarly a composer has here a repertoire of basic

tonal types of the plot of the work. Analogies between story telling in a novel
and symphony continue when we pass further in the study and examine more
figurative expressions in both fields. In any case one has to note if one builds one’s
narrative theory of art, say music or literature, that Propp’s model concerns popu-
lar culture, whereas novel or symphony is art, so they are on different levels, and
this may limit Propp’s application to aesthetics of 19th or 20th century. Proppian
models function certainly again well in the popular culture of our oral age.
Altogether, this might even lead us to think of the birth of Russian formalism
aus dem Geiste der Musik like Nietzsche about tragedy.
18.4 Lev Karsavin (1892–1952)
One name which above sounded perhaps strange in this collection was Karsavin.
Certainly he is among those scholars well known in Russia but totally ignored in
the West. I heard about him rather recently in connection to the Lithuanian philo-
sopher and aesthetician Wilhelm Sesemann, who had invited this Russian intel-
lectual from Russia to Kaunas University in the 1930s. Unfortunately, these two
extremely important scholars remained there after the occupation of Lithuania
and did not emigrate early enough, so they shared the destiny of being sent to
Siberia, where Karsavin died in 1952. Sesemann, however, survived and returned
as rehabilitated to Kaunas, where he lived until 1962. About Karsavin and his last
writing we have the beautiful French translation Le poème de la mort (Éditions
L’Âge d’Homme, 2003). Particularly its postface contained valuable information
for me. Entitled Une philosophie de la dépossession, it shows how Karsavin in that
extreme existential situation could create a most fascinating concept of omni-
temporality, something like Marcel Proust, a notion I am using in my own exist-
ential semiotics nowadays.
But, why I want to raise these two names just in this context of Russian formal-
ism, although neither of them is directly mentioned in any Western encyclopaedia
of semiotics as Russian formalists, is due to their important position of mediating
formalist ideas to other scholars who became influential in the semiotic field.
How many know that Sesemann was the logic teacher of A. J. Greimas at Kaunas
University, where he attended his course in 1934 as his study book clearly shows?
How many know that Greimas, the founder of the Paris school of semiotics,
said later that it was from Karsavin he realized that the Lithuanian language
could be used as a scientific discourse? This Russian scholar had namely learned
Lithuanian so fully that he could write and publish using it. Certainly even less
known is that the first Finnish semiotician is the celebrated nephew of Sesemann,
18.4 Lev Karsavin (1892–1952) | 379
Figure 18.4: Greimas’s study book at the University of Kaunas in 1934 (from the archives
of Rimtautas Kašponis, reproduced by permission).
Finnish poet Henry Parland, who in the 1920s wrote cultural essays inspired by
Russian formalists like Žirmunsky, on Russian and American movies, on the
Jewish Theatre of Kaunas, etc., which when now read look like ‘Roland Barthes
before Roland Barthes’. However, this young man passed away at 22 years old in
Kaunas at his uncle Sesemann’s residence, where he had been sent by his parents
to avoid the temptations of Bohemian artists in the restaurants of Helsinki. Henry
had got his ideas via his uncle, whose treatise on aesthetics which appeared
in Lithuanian in the 1960s Žirmunsky had provided a preface for. (Later I had
correspondence with my teacher Greimas about a possible English translation of
this important study, but as far as I know it has not even yet been realized.) And
Sesemann was a half Finn. An honorary member of the Finnish Semiotic Society,
psychiatrist Oscar Parland (1991) has studied the life of his brother and uncle,
and a monograph on Sesemann has also been published recently by the German
scholar Thorsten Botz-Bornstein fairly recently (2006).
Anyway, now we have entered this very fascinating but chaotic area of the
emergence of Russian formalism. The linguist teacher of Roman Jakobson Prince
Trubetskoy as known had written about his ideas of the Turanian language which
followed the principles of phonetic harmony. Behind this was the idea that the
Figure 18.5: Henry Parland, the first Finnish semiotician, in Kaunas in 1930,
half a year before his passing away
18.4 Lev Karsavin (1892–1952) | 381
essential Russian character was in its ethnicity in pre-Slavic prehistory best re-
flected in the phonology of the Turkic languages of Central Asia. Trubetskoy de-
rived a theory of national psychology from phonological data, which, according
to the American scholar Richard Taruskin, was ‘breathtakingly virtuosic’ (1997:
395) These phonological principles and laws manifested in the use of different
types of vowels: if the first syllable contained one of the back vowels a, o, i, u,
then all the other syllables of that word must contain one of these back vowels. If
the first syllable contains one of the front vowels ä, ö, i, y, then the other syllables
must contain one of these vowels. A mixture of back and front vowels in a single
word was not allowed – like in the Estonian word ‘aitä’ (thanks!) In some Turkic
languages similar laws also regulate the use of consonants like k, g, and l. Some
consonants are allowed only in back-voweled words, whereas some like d, b, g,
j, z, and zh are allowed only between vowels. The same harmoniousness and
pedantic observance of uniform law was also noticeable in the grammar of the
Turkic languages. Then Trubetskoy drew his conclusion also as to the character
of Turks: they love symmetry, clarity, stable equilibrium. Once it was obtained
he wanted to preserve it as a universal system. Moreover, he said that this is a
characteristic of all Turanians, including Eurasian Russians. Turanian psyche im-
parts cultural stability and strength to the nation, affirms cultural and historical
continuity. All that is best was due to this primal Turanian character among Rus-
sians; all that is worst was the fault of Peter the Great, who brought the disastrous
Romano-Germanic toxins.
Trubetskoy’s fantastic visions were particular because he based his neo-
primitivist thinking as emanating from, so to say, ‘modern’ empirical science, i.e.,
linguistics. Taruskin thinks that this worldview and Eurasian ideology explains
also such a work in Stravinsky as Svadebka, also known as Les Noces, a musical
portrayal of Russian wedding ceremonies.
Yet, from Trubetskoy Lev Karsavin developed the Eurasian ideology even fur-
ther, referring to Turanian character as a higher symphonic personality or ‘sym-
phonic subject’. Karsavin wrote: “A symphonic subject is not an agglomeration
or simply the sum of individual subjects but rather their concord (symphony) the
coordination of the one and many and – in the ideal and at the limit, the all-in-
one.” Accordingly, a nation is not only a sum of social groups but their organized
and coordinated hierarchical unity. The culture of a nation is no mere sum but a
symphonic unity of more local cultures. Similarly, national cultures can constitute
a larger cultural unity, e.g., Hellenistic, European, Eurasian. Thus the higher sym-
phonic personality lives in a kind of pleroma as Taruskin defines it, i.e., the state of
renouncing the I of the lower or smaller sphere for the sake of the higher. Karsavin
uses here a musical metaphor, comparing the individuum to a single voice, the
carrier of a cantus firmus, within the vast polyphonic texture of the total-unity, the
pleroma (Taruskin 1997: 404). This idea is not only close to Scriabin – the sister
of Karsavin was the famous ballerina Tamara Karsavina, so he lived amidst mu-
sical circles – but also to Vladimir Solovyov and his ideas of Russian culture. Yet,
Solovyov disagreed completely with the idea of a specific mystic Russian Eastern
character, all that is good in Russia came from Europe; he says in his essay “Über
die russische Frage” that there is no question of whether Russia exists, but the
problem is whether it exists with dignity, forgetting its national egoism. So he
came to the same conclusion as Karsavin, yet by other routes.
What are we to think of all that, and what does this have to do with Russian
formalism? At least the idea that one art work like Les Noces was only a sign or
symbol of a certain ideological movement, like Taruskin saw it, is anti-formalist.
Since the emergence of linguistics we have known that a new articulation can
take place in every level of generation of meaning. So an art work never exhausts
its potential of signification to any background philosophy. To put it as simply as
Beethoven once: Music is higher form than any philosophy.
18.5 Wilhelm Sesemann
I have written a small essay earlier about Karsavin’s colleague who tempted him to
Kaunas, Wilhelm (Vasily or Vasilius) Sesemann. The young German scholar Thor-
sten Botz-Bornstein has also written about Sesemann. The nephew of Sesemann
Oscar Parland gave me copies of some books by Sesemann published in German.
The most important point I could find there is that meaning was always something
ungegenständlich, immaterial, so to study it empirically is very hard. In fact, in
Greimas and his notion of isotopy we find the same argument – although isotopies
could be said to consist of recurrent classemes – and the semiosphere by Tartu-
Moscow school, or to put it like the American semiotician John Deely: sign is never
a thing, it is an object.
Botz-Bornstein, moreover, has discovered that for Sesemann the meaning was
neither totally subjective, i.e. to be studied as the state of human mind, nor com-
pletely objective, i.e., existing in a text, but living between them, in a form he saw
to possess a certain rhythm. Sesemann was influenced by Russian formalism, but
his view on the form was rather dynamic, almost kinetic. The place where he put it
between the subjective and objective comes close to Greimas’s concept of le monde
naturel, which was not at all anything natural but something already semiotized
by the human mind.
As said, Žirmunsky was Sesemann’s close friend. The Lithuanian scholar
Rimtautas Kašponis has studied the youth of Greimas and discovered a lot of
things. However, Sesemann also criticizes Russian formalists; his view of struc-
18.5 Wilhelm Sesemann | 383
Figure 18.6: Sesemann in 1912
ture was that it was inner rhythm which constituted the true aesthetic moment.
This was close to Lossky’s notion of the organic whole or neo-Kantian efforts
to dynamize static logical systems. Elsewhere, however, Sesemann emphasized
the two forms of knowledge: kennen and wissen, of which the first one was more
important. Not the notion of ‘device’ priem from Šklovsky was the true essence of
an art work. In his study Iskusstvo i kul’tura (which, by the way, appeared in 1927,
the same year as Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit), Sesemann said of it: “The notion
of device as used by the school of the Formalists which is for them a substitute
for form in spite of all the methodological convenience it offers it cannot be
considered sound from a philosophical point of view. Form understood only as
a device of artistic expression takes in a subjective-intentional character and
seems to exist without any relation to the material itself” (quoted from Botz-
Bornstein 2006: 41). Yet, elsewhere he said: “Formalists are absolutely right in
insisting that poetics should above all flow out of linguistics.” But Sesemann’s
‘formalism’ is an aesthetic one” (ibid.: 41), but it is true that he was a philosopher
and aesthetician in the first place and moved on to another level of abstraction
than more concretely thinking formalist scholars.
Next I try to take some cases of how the ideas of Russia formalism were later
received and how they exercised their impact on subsequent semiotics. Let me
call it like Thomas Sebeok ‘global semiotics’.
18.6 Vladimir Propp
Certainly then the name which first dives up is Vladimir Propp. The innovation
made in Morfologiya skazki as early as in 1928 is decisive. Now we can only pon-
der from which kind of network of ideas it emerged in order to understand its
fecundity. The basic realization of Propp when dealing with Russian fairy tales
was that elements of one tale could be transferred to another tale without any
change. For instance Baba Yaga can appear in most diverse fairy tales and plots.
The very notion of plot is defined as follows: one chooses at random one part of
a tale, and provides it with word ‘about’ and then definition is ready: for instance
tale containing a dragon fight is of type: fairy tale about fight with a dragon. Propp
found all other classifications earlier unsuccessful. For Veselovsky plot consisted
of several motifs, a motif develops into a section. Plot is a theme which consists of
various situations. For him motif is primary, plot is secondary. But Propp thought
that we have to first segment a tale, only thereafter can we make comparisons.
All questions in the study of tales lead to that so far unresolved problem that why
all fairy tale in the world remind of each other. How can we explain that a tale
about frog queen is so similar in Russia, Germany, France, India, America and New
Zeeland. As known for Propp the basic unit of tale was ‘a function’. So Propp for-
mulated his hypotheses : 1) Functions are stable units of fairy tales, independent
of who fulfils them or how dramatis personae realize them; 2) number of functions
is limited; 3) the order of functions, their sequence is identical; 4) all fairy tales
belong to the same genre. However functions do not follow immediately each
other. When different persons pursue consecutively functions, the latter person
has to know all what happened before he can enter. (How well this is a realized in a
Wagnerian myth opera, Wagner whom Lévi-Strauss considered the first structural
analyst of a myth!).
Propp’s functions:
absence
interdiction
violation
reconnaissance
delivery
fraud
complicity
villainy
lack
mediation, the connective moment
beginning counter action
departure
the first function of the donor
the hero’s reaction
the provision, receipt of magical agent
spatial translocation
struggle
marking
victory
the initial misfortune or lack is liquidated
return
pursuit,chase
rescue
unrecognized arrival
the difficult task
solution: a task is accomplished
recognition
exposure
transfiguration: new appearance
punishment
wedding
(quoted from Greimas 1966: 193–194)
The core of Propp’s heritage is certainly here, since later narratology most eagerly
adopted the idea of segmentation into basic units, functions. Later they could
be called differently like ‘narrative programs’ . . . and ‘later’ means the time after
translation of Propp’s seminal work into American (1958) and French (1965).
To what extent did Propp use the Finnish school of folkloristics for his
achievement? Vilmos Voigt answered to my request by a letter:
In Russia N. P. Andrejev appeared in the Folkore Fellows series, in which his two books have
been published. I do not know where is his correspondence with Kaarle Krohn and Antti
Aarne. Andrejev was a professor at St. Petersburg University, an old fashioned fairy tale type
scholar. Probably he was the first who thought that one should make a catalogue of Russian
folktale types. The Russkoe geograficheskoe obshchestvo (whose director was the famous
orientalist Duke S. F. Oldenburg) founded a skazochnaja committee, a research committee
for folk tales. It invited Propp to make a catalogue of fairy tale types. Propp got a grant but
soon thought that Aarne’s system was outdated and when he had read through Afanasjev’s
classical fairy tale collection, he realized that many fairy tales followed the same structure.
This was the birth of Propp’s morphology. He wrote his own book three times. First it was
a narrative story, what was really no morphology at all. Committee did not accept that writ-
ing. Then following V. M. Žirmunsky’s advice Propp wrote a short text with only schemes
and diagrams. It was almost incomprehensible. Then emerged the well-known last version,
which was published in the book series of Russian literature and its morphology. Editor was
again Žirmunsky.
After the Second World War, they published Afanasjev’s three-part fairytale collection which
has at its end the catalogue of fairytale types, following Aarne-Thompson in 1928, about 100
printed pages, and the writer was Propp.
If we compare Aarne-Thompson type stores and Propp’s morphological diagrams, the divi-
sion of texts is similar: but purpose was different. Accordingly Propp knew since the begin-
ning how was the ‘Finnish’ analysis of fairy tale types, and he twice wrote such a catalogue –
yet his own method of morphology was different. By the way, this background has been
portrayed sufficiently in the dictionary of Enzyklopedie des Märchens. . . . This Encyclopedia
has entries for Propp, Andrejev, Morphologie etc.
In the 1960s the Russian folklorists like K. V. Chistov have underlined that Propp “was a
deeply Soviet great scholar”, whereas the Westen folklorists and Isidor Levin expressed
the opinion that the context of Propp’s life work was international. The rebirth of Propp’s
Morphology was the idea of Roman Jakobson and the first English version appeared thanks
to Thomas A. Sebeok. (Email letter from Voigt to the author in July 2013.)
Lévi-Strauss published his comments on Propp in his essay in Cahiers de l’Institut

de science économique appliqué no 9, mars 1960 entitled “L’analyse morphologique
des contes russes” and simultaneously in English in International Journal of Slavic
Linguistics and Poetics 3, 1960. He starts it by saying that those exercising struc-
tural analysis have been often accused of formalism. This means that form is de-
termined by its opposition to the matter which is alien to it. Whereas structure
does not have any separate contents: it is the content put in a logical organization,
which is conceived as a property of the real” (Lévi-Strauss 1973: 139). Lévi-Strauss
praises the translators of Propp’s work who have done an immense service to the
human sciences by their work. Lévi-Strauss then comments Propp and admits that
his criticism of previous scholars is justified (Miller, Wundt, Aarne, Veselovsky):
problem is that one can always find tales which belong at the same time to sev-
eral categories because classification is based upon types of tale or themes which
they enact. The distinction of theme again is arbitrary. The classification of Aarne
provided an inventory of themes which is of big help but the segmentation is
purely empirical, although belonging of one tale to one category is always ap-
proximate. As to Propp’s chain of functions Lévi-Strauss rather recommends to
replace the linear line of Proppian functions ABCD . . . MNH . . . TUVWX by an al-
gebraic matrix because very often one function is negation or conversion of an-
other, say ‘departure’ and ‘return’ or ‘prohibition’ and ‘violation’ and so the story
teller rather picks up his elements from a mathematical matrix like:
w −x 1/y 1−z
−w 1/x 1−y z
1/w 1−x y −z
1−w x −y 1/z
When Lévi-Strauss published this no one would believe that there would be a
reaction on Propp’s side. No one could think that a scholar having published in
1928 would be still alive. However, Propp responded and thought that Lévi-Strauss
had attacked him, and so he felt insulted. Lévi-Strauss in turn wrote a postscript
in which he said that this had not been his purpose at all (this was published in
the Italian version of Propp’s work Morfologia della fiaba. Torino: Einaudi, 1966).
He stated that to his eyes the Propp’s work kept its imperishable value because it
was the first in the line.
Propp’s work was indeed celebrated by the structuralist movement by and
large. For Greimas it was one of the starting points for his school and he launched
the discussion in his Sémantique structurale in 1966. He paid attention like Lévi-
Strauss that the list of Propp could be made more economic and as to actant and
actors doing the functions one could distinguish what he called mythical actants
model with six members: subject, object, sender, receiver, helper, and opponent.
Nevertheless, the concept of an actant appears in his book much earlier than he
speaks about Propp in the chapter À la recherche des modèles de transformation
(Greimas 1969: 192). Also Greimas tries to reduce the number of functions.
Yet, the History of Structuralism by François Dosse mentions Russian form-
alism rather passingly and only when it has impact on French structuralism.
However, when Propp’s book appeared at Seuil in 1965 it became the source of
inspiration for the whole structuralist movement. It had appeared in English in
1958 thanks to the initiative of Jakobson and effort of Thomas A. Sebeok, yet
Lévi-Strauss had discovered it as early as 1960.
Not only Greimas tried to improve Propp but also Claude Brémond in his Lo-
gique du récit tried to show that the functions were always following three phases:
first there was a possibility for an action, i.e., virtuality, then one could choose
either passage to act or not passage to act, and if positively, then achievement
or non-achievement. Nevertheless, even this idea has been anticipated by Boris
Asafiev in his intonation theory speaking about musical form as a process and
stating that all music was based upon three phases: initium, motus and terminus,
like in tonal music tonic, dominant and tonic – which could again serve as a new
initium for next phase (like in Wagner’s opera as a Kunst des Überganges, where as
the terminus serves a diminished seventh harmony from which the musical wave
can go to any direction whatsoever).
But there were also other scholars working further with Proppian model. If
Lévi-Strauss had changed his linear change into an achronic matrix, this was elab-
orated further by Elli-Kaija Köngäs-Maranda and Pierre Maranda in their article on
“Structural Models in Folklore” appeared in Midwest Folklore (Fall 1962). They list
earlier studies on structure in folklore as Propp’s Morphology and Lévi-Strauss,
Sebeok and Alan Dundes. The primary goal of all of them was to find out the
smallest operational units of structure. Aarne proposed it as ‘type’ 1910, Propp as

‘function’ in 1928; they were both content units without operational value. Then
Thompson proposed motif in 1932 and Lévi-Strauss ‘mytheme’ in 1955 (study on
Oedipus myth). The latter was a contentual structural unit consisting of a relation
between subject and predicate. Ultimately, Dundes proposed in 1962 a motifeme,
which was an act of a protagonist, taking into account its meaning in the whole
fairy tale. Yet, for Kongas-Maranda the crucial problem was to find the opposed
pairs and the mediator between them. This could be put in the simple formula
A : B :: B : C. Lévi-Strauss’s scheme fx(a) : fy(b) :: fx(b) : fa−1(y) had to be under-
stood as a formulation of the mediating process. Then Kongas-Maranda were able
to portray different types of mediation. Starting from the analysis of a tsheremiss
story by Thomas A. Sebeok, these were zero-mediator, unsuccessful mediator and
successful mediator.
When the structuralist fashion lost its attractiveness, what remained was the
narratology, which could still consider Propp as its pioneer. Especially almost
all canonical analyses of stories start with segmentation. For instance even in
musical narratology this functions, like I have tried to show in my study of the
G minor Ballade of Chopin with its modal grammar (Tarasti 1994). But it is as Ugo
Volli has said about such use of Propp, that since Propp various authors have tried
to extend the morphology to other narrative genres, like myth, legend, popular
literature, and modern novel. But in order to do so it is necessary that analysis
is brought upon a higher level of abstraction (Manuale di semiotica, Volli 2000:
111). It is hard to imagine any other type of systematic narrative study than just
stemming from Proppian ‘functions’.
18.7 Mikhail Bakhtin
Yet, there is another Russian formalist classic who became very influential in the
West in the 1980s. This was Mikhail Bakhtin. His profound ideas on own/alien
speech, dialogical imagination, polyphonic discourse in literature, ideologemes,
and carnivalist culture had a major impact on Western intelligentsia.
When now rereading Bakhtin this seems still to be quite evident.
The originality of Bakhtin’s thought is still quite obvious when one returns
to his own writings. As the background of many of his ideas, dialogism, etc. can
be seen the culture of public disputes after revolution to which Bakhtin attended
when he escaped from St. Petersburg to Nääveli. There local communists arranged
public discussions or disputes on various general themes, such as Does God exist.
Bakhtin was active according to the reviews in local newspapers, investigated
by Prof. Erkki Peuranen, Jyväskylä University. Bakhtin even cried in one of them
when he defended the God against the Marxist idea that he was mere invention of
priests to maintain their power. These events may be interpreted as kernels to his
later ideas on dialogue – and also of ideologeme, i.e., that there are now concepts,
ideas, ideologies as such but only as enunciated by someone in a communication,
i.e., dialogue with others. Later he tried to prove this by his example from liter-
ature, like Dostoevsky. Yet anyone who has written novels understands that the
richness of a literary text is based upon the fact that writer does not only declare
something but portrays in which situation, in which sense, in which manner, to
whom the idea is propagated. Winfried Nöth in his Handbuch der Semiotik (2000:
95–97) emphasizes the undefinite, undetermined and continuous nature of signi-
fication in Bakhtin. He quotes from 1929: “Nothing is definite. The last word of the
world and about the world was not yet announced. The world is open and free.
All is in future and will also remain in future”. This way of thinking of meaning
as a continuous process is related to Lévinas’s philosophy of unfinite, and also to
the existential semiotics. In all these basic epistemic models the subject is going
towards an unknown undetermined reality, X, may it be called Other or anything
else.
Augusto Ponzio has in his semiophilosophy and semioethics together with
Susan Petrilli taken Bakhtin as one of his precursors. Ponzio tries to analyse the
present globalized reality in Bakhtinian terms and also the life in the European
Union. He sees Bakhtin as a philosopher and not only as literary theoretician (for
instance Ponzio 1993: 107–138 and Petrilli & Ponzio 1999: 305–320). In fact Ponzio
says “We take ‘our’ words, says Bakhtin, from the mouth of others. “Our” words
are always semi-other. They are pregnant with the intentions of others before
we use them ourselves as the materials and instruments of our own intentions.
Consequently . . . our discourses and thoughts are inevitably dialogic . . . ”
Yet, in the West it was perhaps Julia Kristeva who first introduced ideas of
Bakhtin. She noted as early as in 1966 in her essay Le Mot, le Dialogue et le Roman,
that what is involved is a ‘cosmogony’ in which ‘on ne connait pas la substance, la
cause, l’identité en dehors du rapport avec le tout qui n’existe que dans et par la rela-
tion’ (op. cit.: 160). She speaks of Bakhtin’s intertextuality in ‘two texts which join,
they contradict and relativize. The one who attends carnival is at the same time
actor and spectator. She distinguishes epic literature which is monologistic from a
dialogical one. In fact, we can notice like Kristeva the following cases: a) subject
of utterance, enunciate coincides with the zero value of subject of enunciation:
‘he’ or proper name, The most simple narrative technique which gives birth to a
story; b) it coincides the subject of enunciate with subject of enunciation: ‘me’. ‘I’;
c) coincidence of subject of enunciate with the destinator: ‘you’; d) coincidence
of subject of enunciation at the same time with subject of enunciation and destin-
ator. Novel becomes a play with writing and tagging the dialogical nature of the
book. Kristeva ends up with a scheme portraying these cases:
Practice God
‘Discourse’ ‘History’
Dialogism Monologism
Correlational logics Aristotelian logics
Syntagma System
Carnaval Narrative
Ambivalence; Menippea; Polyphonic novel.
If the word is the minimal unit in Bakhtin’s theory, there can be found two
types: own word and alien word. Authoritarian word comes from the exterior
and demands to be accepted, it penetrates into us independently whether we find
it innerly convincing. The distinction between own and alien is very important in
Bakhtin. We may think this coincides with existential semiotics and its categories
of Moi/Soi. According to Bakhtin, the resistance to the alien, external world is of
highest importance to the development of individual ideology and identity. The
whole process of learning and education is after all: how the alien becomes own.
How it is made into something ‘own’.
Yet, surprising was in quite recent years the emergence of a special cultural
psychological theory from Bakhtin’s ideas and their application to psychotherapy
and cognitive and neurological brain studies. Hubert Hermans has created a the-
ory of dialogical self entirely on Bakhtinian basis. He writes:
“Dialogical self is inspired by both James’ 1890 classic distinction between
I and me and Bakhtinian metaphor of the polyphonic novel. According to this
theory ‘The I’ fluctuates among different and even opposed positions, and has
the capacity imaginatively to endow each position with a voice so that dialogical
relations between positions can be established . . . Self and society both function
as a polyphony of consonant and dissonant voices.” These ideas lead Hermans to
observation of two kinds of positions: one as intersubjective interchange and the
other as dominance or social power. The one may ask how dialogical the brain
is and scrutinize dysfunctions like schizophrenia as a ‘collapse of the dialogical
self’. Psychologists studying ‘narrative structure in psychosis, confirm: “Theor-
ists across discipline have described the dynamic and multifaceted nature of self-
experience, stressing that the self is inherently ‘dialogical’ or the product of on-
going conversations both within the individual and between the individual and
others.” (p. 209). Moreover, Mikael Leiman from Joensuu University argues: “Se-
miotic position and Bakhtinian notions of the signs suggest modification of the
concept of I-position. Person’s position reveals his or her subjective stance with
regard to the addressee. The addressee . . . is an invisible third, is always seen to
adopt a reciprocal stance, a counter-position. Thus instead of a dialogue between

an I position (a voice) and another, each I position has dialogical relationship to its
addressee. I positions are embodied in signs, and sign mediate changes between
the positions”. Also Heikki Majava, a Finnish psychiatrist has developed a model
of transference based upon two I positions, in the Bakhtinian sense.
There, if one says in existential semiotics that dialogue can be a disturbance
in communication in which the I tries to communicate his/her ideas, this dis-
turbance is welcome and beneficent – it must be there as a particular ‘noise’ of
the communication channel, albeit true that the other, the addressee remains an
alien-psychic entity of which we can only hypothesize that he/she is something
similar to the speaking subject.
Thus almost unnoticed we glide with Bakhtin into most actual debate of the
nature of the self and cultural communication.
Altogether, we see that the heritage of Russian formalism is not only shared by
the Tartu-Moscow school of cultural semiotics, albeit here in a privileged position;
Bakhtinian reception takes place also directly all over the world. Many applying
him hardly even know his background in the formalist movement, and some spe-
cialists even deny that he belonged to that school at all. There he is, however,
put in the encyclopaedias of semiotics. Yet it is typical of contemporary schools
of cultural theory and other to utilize these great figures as innovators but detach
them from their ideational context. Of course we are not interested in Propp or
Bakhtin in the first place as historic documents of early 20th century thought but
due to the weight of their thought of its own. We read them as classics, who are
never exhausted.
Chapter 19
Wilhelm Sesemann in the context of semiotics
19.1 Introduction
We now know that Wilhelm Sesemann was the greatest philosopher in the his-
tory of Lithuania. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein study is the first “Western” treatise
to take him seriously in that regard, and to explore carefully the relationships
between Sesemann’s thought and the Russian and German philosophy of his time.
As Botz-Bornstein observes, however, Sesemann’s thought comes at us from so
many angles, it is difficult to define the “real” philosophy of this Baltic thinker.
In Finland, interest in Sesemann’s work has stemmed mostly from its con-
nection to semiotics. His name first surfaced here around 1982, when semiotics
began to gain a foothold in our country, and the Semiotic Society of Finland began
its annual meetings. The third of those, held in Jyväskylä in 1983, represented
a notable expansion of Finnish semiotics onto the international scene. Among
the featured speakers was Henri Broms (1985) and the great Franco-Lithuanian
scholar, Algirdas Julien Greimas, who had lectured in Helsinki as early as 1979.
Also featured was the Finnish psychiatrist and writer Oscar Parland (1912–1997),
who later became an honorary member of our society. He and his brother, the
Finnish poet Henry Parland (1908–1930), were nephews of Wilhelm Sesemann.
When Henry was declared the “First Finnish semiotician”, interest began to grow
in how and where he had gotten his ideas on semiotics. Oscar Parland, in lectures
at meetings of the Finnish Semiotic Society, spoke about the Parland-Sesemann
family history, and how Henry got his ideas about Russian formalism from his
uncle, Sesemann. In those lectures, Oscar told breath-taking stories about Sese-
mann, his exile to Siberia, and his subsequent rehabilitation. The lectures were
first published in Synteesi in 1991 and included in a collection entitled Oscar Par-
land 1991, Tieto ja eläytyminen: Esseitä ja muistelmia (Knowledge and Empathy:
Essays and Reminiscences).
At about the same time, Greimas, my former teacher in Paris, began to pro-
mote Lithuanian patrimony. He spoke of Sesemann having taught at Kaunas Uni-
versity when he was a student there, and told me about a study that Sesemann had
written on aesthetics, which I determined to have translated into English. In our
correspondence on the matter, Greimas mentioned a son of Sesemann living in
Paris as an immigrant, but doubted that he would have been a pupil of his father.
Hence any opinions about “Finnish” roots of Sesemann’s thought are speculative,
and based on the internal content of his doctrine.
Of course, an essential moment in the development of European semiotics

was that of Russian Formalism, and the Preface to Sesemann’s Estetika was writ-
ten by the formalist Žirmunsky, well-known for his studies in metrics. (My know-
ledge of that preface is limited to Žirmunsky’s mention of Yuri Tynianov, among
the names of other Russian formalists.) Oscar Parland considered it obvious that
Henry’s ideas about Russian Formalism came from their uncle, Sesemann, who
had gotten them from Žirmunsky.
In 1990, I commented on Sesemann in an article written (in both Finnish and
English) for the Nordic art review, Siksi, from which I dare to quote:
It would be tempting to draw connections between the neo-Kantian philosophy and epi-
stemology of Sesemann and Greimas’s semiotics, but at least in practice there was no inter-
action between the two men. The fact that Greimas returned to the subject/object problem
in his “third semiotic revolution” was due to quite different reasons than Sesemann’s philo-
sophy. Nevertheless, some thoughts Sesemann had were quite close to those of Greimas.
One of these was the differentiation between the concepts Wissen and Kennen. Since then,
the French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch has spoken in the same manner about the
difference between savoir and connaissance: the former denotes knowledge acquired from
books; the latter, knowledge based on personal acquaintance. Perhaps Greimas’ modality of
‘know’ (savoir), should also be divided into those two types, according to his own categories
of exteroceptive/interoceptive . . . .
(Tarasti 1990b: 17)
Only a year after my article appeared, Oscar Parland’s (1991) Empathy and Know-
ledge was published, which contained a more detailed explication of Sesemann’s
philosophy. In Parland’s view, the essential dichotomy – and common thread –
in Sesemann’s thought is the distinction between objective and subjective know-
ledge (Gegenständliche und ungegenständliche Erkenntnis).
Fundamental to objective knowledge is the separation between subject (per-
ceiver) and object (perceived). To gain such knowledge thus requires a kind of
reduction that attempts to bracket all subjective elements from the act of percep-
tion or sensation (Erkenntnis). In the act of conceptualization, the subject tries to
dominate, take over, and assimilate the object, which appears as a transcendental
entity to a subject that is alien to it. The subject grasps the object and detaches
it from the Umwelt in which it has been embedded. Extracted from its “native”
habitat, the object is set before the subject, to be observed, in terms of Kantian
categories, as a “thing” (Gegenstand). Most important to the described process is
the external appearance (Erscheinung) of the object, that is to say, the medium or
phenomenon by which it appears to a subject.
That process often involves violence – what Sesemann calls Vergewaltigen –
to the object, particularly when such observation is directed to living entities or to
psychic, spiritual, and similar phenomena. Objective knowledge alone (Erkennen)
394 | 19 Wilhelm Sesemann in the context of semiotics
becomes less and less satisfactory, the deeper we proceed into the realm of psychic
realities; the intellectual violence grows, causing distortions of knowledge to mul-
tiply:
subject object
Figure 19.1: Subject/object relation in Sesemann
We can see in the above discussion a critique of Husserl – oft-mentioned in Sese-

mann studies – and an anticipation of Heidegger’s principle of Gelassenheit (let-
ting things be), or in the semiotic terms of Charles Morris, “lettings things hap-
pen”.
At the opposite pole lies non-objective (ungegenständliche) knowledge, or
Wissen, such as that of realities connected with morals, religion, or aesthetic
phenomena. This kind of knowledge differs most radically from the objective kind,
in that it makes no clear distinction between subject and object. The subject is
part of the reality that it experiences; and that experience necessarily includes the
subject’s self-knowledge as well as the subject’s consciousness of itself (Erlebnis,
personal experience). The subject recognizes itself in the object, and temporarily
shifts to the latter’s side, yet without separating the object from its proper Umwelt.
In this act the subject is “split” into two halves: one part of the subject remains as
subject; the other part shifts to the object, with which it fuses:
Figure 19.2: The recognition of subject in object
Sesemann’s notion of Wissen has its counterpart in the so-called “Third semiotic
revolution” sparked by Greimas, who after his hyper-objective, “linguistics phase”
(e.g., Greimas 1966), began to figure subjective aspects into his semiotic theories,
via the concept of modalities (e.g., Greimas 1973). He implicitly acknowledged as
much in a speech given at the Kalevala symposium in Paris in 1985, when he said
the ancient Finns were not so stupid as to have worshipped mere objects, stones,
trees, and so on, but rather, the spirit in those objects. He moreover claimed to
have more empathy with German-romantic ethnology than with that of positivists,
which only gather things and classify them – an attitude also taken by Sesemann.
In what follows, my assessment of Sesemann’s thought is based on copies of

several of his studies, which were kindly sent to me by Greimas and Oscar Parland:
Beiträge zum Erkenntnisproblem III: Das Logisch-Rationale (1930); Die logischen
Gesetze im Verhältnis zum subjektbezogenen und psychischen Sein (1931); Estetika
and Musu laiku gnoseologijai naujai besiorientuojant (1935a); and Zum Problem der
logischen paradoxien (1935b). Those texts can be re-read in many ways, and Botz-
Bornstein’s reading of them in the light of Lacan and Bakhtin seems completely
justifiable: Oscar Parland tells us that Sesemann knew Freud and admired his
treatise on dreams; and as mentioned above, Sesemann’s contact with Russian
Formalism was real, given his personal friendship with Žirmunsky.
We can also read Sesemann in the framework of ‘existential semiotics’ (e.g.,
Tarasti 2000). In my theories, the “classic” semiotic doctrines remain valid, es-
pecially that of Greimas, but influences also flow into it from German philosophy
(Hegel, Kant, Jaspers, Heidegger) as well as from Kierkegaard, Sartre, de Beau-
voir, Jean Wahl and others. That variety of sources mirrors the influences on Sese-
mann’s thought, and hence provides a suitable framework for my interpretation of
his writings in terms of Greimassian and/or existential semiotics, to which Sese-
mann is shown to be a precursor.
First of all, almost anywhere he uses the term “logical” we can replace it with
the term “semiotical”. Sesemann always underlines the fact that he is studying
the logical structure of the world and not its psychological content, as is the case
with Greimassian as well as existential semiotics. Further, as a musicologist, I find
interesting his analysis of der Schall, or “sound” (Sesemann 1931: 114). He, like
Ernst Kurth, urges us to identify music not with printed notes but with Schall,
which is equally translatable as “noise” (a radical anticipation of Futurism!). Once
a sound has been emitted from its object, it creates its own universe:
Daher vermag auch das Geräusch und insbesondere der Ton, als ein von aller Dinglichkeit
losgelöstes Phänomen eine selbständige Existenz zu führen: worauf die Möglichkeit beruht in
Gestalt der Musik eine eigenständige autonome Tonwelt zu schaffen.
(ibid.)
(Therefore sound, and especially the tone, as a phenomenon freed from all materiality, may
lead an independent existence: on which basis rests the potentiality, in the form of music,
for shaping an independent, autonomous tone-world.)
It is interesting that the chapter entitled Die logischen gesetze und das Daseins-
autonome Sein starts with a question about the nature of ‘becoming’ (ibid.: 121):
Is that modality established on logical principles? (“Ist das Werden den logischen
Prinzipien unterworfen?”). That question brings to mind the time Greimas asked
me to write an article for his Dictionnaire on the modality of ‘becoming’ (devenir,
396 | 19 Wilhelm Sesemann in the context of semiotics
Werden), which was inserted into the otherwise rather static, atemporal categories
of his system. Sesemann has this to say about ‘becoming’ (Sesemann 1931: 122):
“Das Werden als Einheit von Sein und Nichtsein ist also das einzig, das wahrhaft
Reale” (Becoming, as a unity of Being and Not-Being, is thus the only, the genu-
inely real).
Sesemann discusses the problem of reducing ‘becoming’ to points of rest
(Ruhemomenten), an issue one also encounters in using the Greimassian semiotic
square, which is based on contrary relations between S1 and S2 and their neg-
ations, non-S1 and non-S2. Here Zeno’s paradox comes into play: we can try to
temporalize the square by following the movement within it, among its various
categories; but at the same time, the static, fixed points of reference remain in
place. In that way, movement is conceived as spatialized (ibid.: 130): “Umdeutung
der Dynamik der Bewegung in statisch räumliches Sein” (A new meaning of the
dynamics of motion in static, spatial being).
Pertinent in this context is the Bergsonian distinction, also mentioned by
Sesemann, between “physical” and “phenomenal” (concrete) time. Sesemann
notes that spatialisation also means objectification (Vergegenständlichung), which
is not the same as conceptualization. According to Sesemann, we can study time
only when we step into it: “. . . als man in ihr drinsteht oder vielmehr mit ihr geht,
also soweit als man selbst zeitlich ist und diese Zeitlichkeit unmittlebar anschaut”
(. . . to the extent that one steps into [time] – or, even further, goes with it – is the
same extent to which one is temporal, and to which one perceives that temporality
directly).
Sesemann’s reflections on the essence of logical negation are precursors of
ideas that Greimas incorporated into his semiotic square. The contradictory op-
position must be specified as a contrary relation (ibid.: 138): “Wir haben nicht mehr
a und non-a sondern a und b vor uns” (We no longer confront a and non-a, but both
a and b). Sesemann deems such motion an aporia, i.e., an unresolvable paradox.
Sesemann links the dialectics of ‘becoming’ to the notion of the possible:
“. . . das Bestimmtwerden als Unbestimmtheit an einer Bestimmtheit oder als
Bestimmtheit eines Unbestimmt-seins” (. . . determinate becoming as indeterm-
inate becoming or as the determination of an indeterminate [state of] being). We
find parallels to that view in existential semiotics, where we speak of three modes
of signs: (1) presigns – inchoate signs, those which are only starting to become
signs, and as such are not yet fixed; (2) act-signs, which are clearly determinable
(bestimmt); (3) and post-signs. Presigns are located in the realm of possibility, and
are therefore virtual (Tarasti 2000: 33). Sesemann likewise says that the concept
of the possible is the foundation for the conceptual presentation of ‘becoming’.
In a chapter on Werden und Identität, Sesemann asks if ‘becoming’ has identity,
and concludes that it does. In doing so, he comes close to the Hegelian notion
of an-sich-sein and für-sich-sein – or in my reformulation, an-mich-sein and für-

mich-sein, the latter of which refers precisely to the identity of a subject.
Sesemann then ponders the category of ideal-allgemeine (the ideally general),
which equates to the notion of “transcendence” in existential semiotics. Sese-
mann criticizes the dominant school of thought, which commits to a conceptual
realism that leads to objectification (Vergegenständlichung) of the general, and
mistakenly takes the latter as an original phenomenon. To Sesemann, that is the
pitfall of Husserl’s method (Sesemann 1931: 173).
When first reading that passage in Sesemann, some twenty years ago, I no-
ticed even then his distinction between the real and the possible (Wirklich/
Möglich). The real, as real, is always something concrete and actual – an act-
sign, in the parlance of existential semiotics – because it is real only insofar as
it is active (wirksam). Therefore, it follows that the relation of the possible to the
real is something concretely actual. The possible itself, in its primal given-ness,
is concretely actual. It signifies the plenitude (Fülle) of possibilities which are
concealed in a real, actual situation. Regarding this issue, Sesemann formulates
a highly interesting axiom (ibid.: 175): “. . . das Allgemeine als Fülle der konkreten
Möglichkeit ist ein konstitutives (wesentliches) Moment der Zeitlichkeit selbst in
ihrem aktuellen Sein” (. . . the general, as a plenitude of concrete possiblities,
is a constitutive [essential] moment of temporality itself in its actual being).
To my mind, Sesemann’s comments bring up the notions of immanent and
manifest, as they appear particularly in musical composition; for example, in
the construction of a theme (possible, immanent) and the actual appearance of it
(real, manifest). In existential semiotics, the same notions help describe how the
transcendental becomes actual in Dasein, how the pleroma (fullness, plenitude)
of the second act of transcendence might be interpreted more precisely as a
plenitude of possibilities.
When Sesemann ponders the relation between formal and transcendental lo-
gics, he provides semioticians with clues as to how signs, in transcendence, func-
tion as pre-signs of Dasein. Sesemann himself uses the term “pre-logical” (1930:
145), and describes the logical sphere as timeless. (In our theory, that would mean
a transcendence that is anti-narrative and achronic.) He goes on to underline the
act-like, processual nature of the logical, and here again, the term “logical” can
be translated profitably into “semiotical”.
I suppose this might be enough evidence of how Sesemann can be brought
directly into past and present debates about semiotics and its epistemological
foundations. Thorsten Botz-Bornstein’s profound and rich inquiry opens up paths
leading to the core of Sesemann’s philosophy. Sesemann’s voice is again heard in
the history of European and Lithuanian philosophy, as well as on the contempor-
ary scene of thought and actuality.
Chapter 20
Roland Barthes or the birth of semiotics from the
spirit of music
I met Barthes twice in 1973 as a doctoral student and awardee of the French gov-
ernment in Paris. In fact he gave me an interview, and I remember one of my
questions: which are to his mind the main trends of structuralist studies at the
moment. He answered with certainty: structural linguistics, Marxism and psy-
choanalysis. But as we know he published in that year his epoch making booklet
Le plaisir du texte in which he definitely left the academic or linguistic semiotics
in favor of a more writerly activity. I also recall his elegant posture and gracious
hands, certainly apt to piano playing.
Roland Barthes was at that time one of the French structuralists which in
the Nordic countries were mostly received via English translations – and Swedish
ones (Mytologier).
It is self-evident that this Barthes no longer was the Barthes of the Frenchmen,
the original one. But anyone working in Paris was taken as French outside it. Just
like of Greimas was said in Toronto: he is a very nice person but so damned French!
And Greimas was after all Lithuanian! My own studies with Barthes were stopped
with those interviews since when I revealed him that I was also in the seminar of
Greimas, he lost his interest.
Yet, Barthes’s Elements of Semiology, was much used as the best concise
introduction to basic semiotic concepts. It represented the classical, Saussur-
ean approach. It taught about such fundamental issues as syntagm/paradigm,
metonymic/metaphoric and applied such rigorous concepts in a ludic manner to
whatsoever topics, chosen not only from the high culture and sublime matters
but as well as from lower spheres of life, those we call in aesthetics ‘lesser arts’.
The fascination of the structural activity just appeared in this diversity of applied
fields when it at the same time maintained its strictly disciplined manner of
reasoning. This combination of course also manifested the very French episteme
of playfulness, jeu.
One of the new methods proposed by Elements of semiology, was the so-
called commutation test, applicable to whatsoever sign system in order to clarify
which were its basic, smallest signifying units. In musical discourse, one could
change the E into E flat in the triad C–E–G and so change major into minor, i.e.,
noticing that this change of musical phonemes also caused the change in mean-
ing: the cheerfulness of major was transformed into sadness of a minor. Moreover,
20 Roland Barthes or the birth of semiotics from the spirit of music | 399
among non-verbal sign system Barthes dealt with gastronomic signs, with his
famous approach to menus.
Nevertheless, among his early essays particularly one was influential as a lac-
onic presentation of the structuralist method, in which he spoke about ‘structural
activity’ of man.
In the early 1970s it inspired me to write a short Barthesian analysis on
Pasolini’s movies Teorema and Oedipus. I quote:
“At first sight it is hard to parallel Oedipus and Teorema by Pasolini. What common could
have that myth of antiquity and the “experience of God” of five persons in an industrial
society? Yet the joining factor can be found, namely by a structural analysis.
Pasolini tries to yield a new type of vision of man, which could be called a structural man.
Roland Barthes speaks about a structural activity, characterized by two phases: the de-
struction of the prevailing structure, and putting together a new structure, i.e. re-construc-
tion.
Hence a structural man takes the given thing, analyses it into pieces and then reassembles it.
In this activity something new emerges, which purely and immediately reflects the human
nature.
Pasolini’s movies precisely portray the emergence of such a type of man. Man can under-
stand his nature only by de-struction of the norms he has internalized, which has been fed
to him from the outside. In Teorema it is shown how the religious experience of five persons
de-structures their bourgeois self-satisfactory world view. The visit of the young man in the
house causes a chaos in each of them – thereafter they try to replace this chaos with their
own new order. It is common to all Pasolini protagonists that they first deny their innermost
essence. Persons in Teorema take the communication with a God difficult because they guess
it will open new avenues in their lives. Yet each of them meet the God just by being their
proper selves.
However, the only one who is able to re-construct a new world view, establishing a harmony
between individual and society, is the servant of the family. For Pasolini re-construction is
above all a social event. Also the members of the capitalist bourgeois family “de-structure”
and “re-structure” but their social situation, i.e. in Marxist terms, their objective class po-
sition forces them to resort to unreal surrogate solutions. The Tolstoyan turn of the father
and the artistic creativity of the son are only mirroring their alienation and not genuine re-
construction. Thus their fate is a nihilist despair . . .
Therefore only the servant in Teorema is able to enact the structural man in its full cogency
and authenticity. She is taken at her home village as a saint, whose role is to heal sick people.
Thus she is not driven out of her society and her solution is sincere re-construction.
Oedipus has no possibilities to re-construction since his contradiction is more universal: the
taboo of incest is the core in every society. Oedipus myth of course is like myths in general a
rationalisation of the contradiction and not its solution.
We found Pasolini’s interpretation of Oedipus when we apply to it the two phases of a struc-
turalist activity. The object of de-struction is then the Freudian variant of the myth, to which
supposedly the modern man connects the Oedipus myth. The Freudian myth is broken by a
simple estrangement: all psychologization is avoided and the reality of myth is reified.
400 | 20 Roland Barthes or the birth of semiotics from the spirit of music
For instance the sphinx and oracle are described with an ethnographic accuracy. If one
wants to see Pasolini’s interpretation one has to be able to see through this colourful ethno-
logical material . . . .”
That was written 40 years ago, but the essay displays the intellectual climate of
that time in which the early Barthes wrote his semiological essays. This essay was
known to us as a German translation by Günther Schiwy and therefore I used in
Finnish the words destrukturierung and restrukturierung.
In fact, the same happened with Mythologies a book from the early Barthes
and much read in the North as Swedish translation. The structure of mythical sign
system seemed to have impact on whatsoever topics to be mythologized. It was
one of the starting points to my own study on Myth and Music; I again quote:
“Roland Barthes has analyzed some modern myths and studied their specific structure using
concepts and methods of semiotics. Myth is not determined, in the opinion of Barthes, by
the content of a message, but by the manner in which the myth gives something meaning
and form. Barthes, considers myth to be a semiotic system, meaning that in myth what
is involved is a sign-system which in a certain sense is independent of any contents . . . .
Myth sees in it only the original substance of its own sign-system. Whether it be literature,
painting or music, myth subordinates it to the position of signifier. Thus any term used by
myth allows two approaches: from the standpoint of the first sign system it is full of meaning,
as it is the terminal point in this system. But from the viewpoint of mythical meaning it
is exhausted when it becomes the first term, signifier, of the mythical system . . . . In all its
abstractness Barthes’s theory will prove to be very useful in studying the connecting points
between myth and music, especially the case in which myth subordinates music, retaining
it as a substance in its own sign system. This theory is easily illustrated:; one may think,
for example, of the futurist adoration of machines at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Examples can be found in almost any futurist poetry, painting or music – such as Honegger’s
mythologization of a train in Pacific 231, to cite only one. Almost any machine might serve
as the substance, or signifier, of the myth while the signified is l’esprit nouveau, modernism,
efficiency, productivity etc. or ultimately the nature-mechanical world view described by
Jaspers, in which even the machines may achieve a mythical life”.
(Tarasti 1979: 27)
Anyway, Barthes’s definition of myth and its structure was still connected with a
certain type of ideology common to intellectuals of the period. Namely, his ana-
lyses of modern myths were all essentially iconoclast, breaking of myths, showing
their illusory nature, and inserting them into the framework of capitalist society
as a special device of the bourgeois class to mislead other classes. The signified,
the “anti-subject” of Barthesian discourse was the Bourgeois class who replaced
the original authentic meaning, signified with its own variant of it.
Now, over thirty years later we can see this issue in another light. Must a
semiotic analysis of myths always be iconoclast? Could we not imagine a positive,
non-iconoclast analysis of myths. Such a study would serve the purpose of such
communities and identities which try to build their own value systems in their
often postcolonial efforts to be heard, understood and accepted by the dominant
groups and societies? If we think of any suppressed individual, community, group
or nation – one does not need to make a list – it would be helpful to them. By a
semiotic analysis they would be able to revive, build and maintain their proper
‘myths’ in their daily struggle of existence.
We can now say that the intellectual attitude portrayed by Barthesian analysis
a.o. has won, the media has questioned all the traditional values as a part of the
globalized marketing culture of consumption, and so the structural activity of “de-
structure” has perhaps lead into results which were not intended by those who
invented these approaches: namely ironization estrangement and banalization of
historically authentic sign practices which now constitute the real resource for
resistance. The very serious question is: Has semiotics participated in the trend
which is ultimately leading to the death of all human sciences, which are replaced
by more “exact”, “efficient”, and “positivist” methods in which any hermeneutic
or existential understanding has been declared as something old-fashioned and
outworn?
Maybe Barthes is not the right person of the structuralist and semiotic move-
ment to be posed such a question, since as we know, after the ‘semiological’ be-
ginning, he turned to a more asystematic, ‘artistic’ manner of presenting his ideas.
Accordingly, he took distance from Greimas and others, who until the end believed
in an ‘efficient human science’ thanks to the exactness of semiotic methods.
Among all the great semioticians of the 20th century Barthes is a rare case
of being inspired by music and having written about music. Of course we cannot
compare him to Lévi-Strauss, whose whole output radiates a musical orientation.
But in the side of Greimas, Lotman, Eco, Kristeva, etc. who wrote about music
almost nothing, Barthes often returned to his own musical tastes and inspirations.
In Le plaisir du texte he emphasized the role of the reader. He said we have
to become again aristocratic readers who read in a decelerated manner, slowly.
Of course, here is no parallel to music: What could it mean to listen to a piece
slowly? We cannot change the musical time. It is rather it which takes us into
its possession; it is like a train going on its own rail with its own tempo while
we are sitting on parallel rails in another wagon following the course of the first
mentioned – which was the metaphor by Henri Bergson to illustrate listening to a
melody.
Yet, often Barthes’s literary studies inspired semioticians of music. I may
mention as only example the study by the British scholar Robert Samuels of
Gustav Mahler’s Sixth Symphony in which he adopted Barthes’s method of the
codes from his S/Z. The author is fascinated by Barthes’s of idea of various super-
imposed codes which are used for reading and interpreting the text. Nevertheless,
the shift from literary codes to musical ones is not entirely unproblematic, since
in musical texts different codes need different technics of analysis.
As a solution Samuels proposed that one takes from the arsenal of musical
semiotics various devices for each code from Nattiez to Stefani. Hence his variant
of the Barthesian method is the following:
“At first, a certain sort of coding strategy on the part of the listener will be suggested; then
potential signifying units for such a code will be identified as rigorously as possible; finally,
the resulting structure will be examined as a semiotic phenomenon.”
(Samuels 1995: 15)
Samuels’s second phase touches the obsession of earlier music semiotics, as it

was represented by Jean-Jacques Nattiez and Nicolas Ruwet, namely the segment-
ation of musical texts. Barthes used in his S/Z his codes as criteria for segmenta-
tion, or rather each segment was systematically studied following his five codes.
This is a reasonable method, but, however, when comparing this approach to
the one by Greimas in his essay on Maupassant – I would say his equivalent to
Barthes’s S/Z –, the advantage of semeanalysis is that a ‘seme’ can concern either
one short phrase or even word as well as whole paragraphs and even chapters.
Thus the text is not broken into discrete parts without connection.
However, Barthes also admitted that we had two types of texts: writerly (script-
ible) and readable (lisible): the first one could be certainly segmented according to
formal syntactic criteria but the latter one was rather a phenomenal, continuous,
processual case, which needed other type of analysis. As far as it was a musical
text Barthes later said about it: Seule la métaphore est exacte, only metaphor is
exact about music – thus joining to the Proustian paradigm of music descriptions.
Distinction between writerly/readable texts occurs also in my own Existential Se-
miotics, I dare to quote again:
“Thus the sign itself is no longer in focus: instead it is the dialogue, not only among people
but between man and text (enunciate, utterance). The concepts of Roland Barthes, such as
lisible/readable) and scriptible (writerly), contain this essential distinction. In a text that is
only lisible one aims to forget the aforementioned dialectics and to merge with the enun-
ciator inside the text. We read holding our breath. We listen as if enchanted. We look with
eyes staring. But when we consider the text to be writerly (scriptible) we move to another
degree of reality into a more semiotical consciousness. We see the text through the eyes of
another text. We hear in some musical passage a reminiscence of Debussy. We see in this and
that painting an allusion to Picasso. We read in this and that phrase a tinge of the Proustian
mémoire involontaire, etc. Even life can be experienced as a text. The autobiography of Stefan
Zweig The World of the Past (Die Welt von Gestern) is written in such a way that the phases
of the writer are first depicted as written, scriptible, an orderly text. At the end, when one
approaches the present time, the text glides into the Barthesian category of lisible . . . .”
(Tarasti 2000: 9–10).
Another theme which appears in Barthesian universe is the corporeality. Even

here there are ideological reasons behind: the body was an untamed, subvers-
ive entity altogether, something which the “bourgeois ideology” could not totally
subordinate. The body was the source of true meaning for Barthes, or at least more
truthful than the ones stemming from socially determined codes. The juxtaposi-
tion: individual/society is looming at the background and there is no doubt on
which side Barthes was standing.
In his famous Leçon inaugurale he launches his provocative idea that lan-
guage as such is a fascist institution. This means that language is always a tool
of suppression and subordination. The mere fact of using a grammar in order to
communicate, the Saussurean langue, is a fascist act to Barthes’s mind – because
he follows here a very Rousseauan reasoning: Qui dit homme, dit langage, et qui
dit langage dit sociéte. And it was the society which was the bad side to his mind.
How can we understand this?
It is paradoxical since one would rather be tempted to think that if language
functions as Saussure has shown on the basis of arbitrariness, i.e., ever new
meanings emerges in each level of articulation, then one should admit that this
also guarantees the liberties to man for a redefinition on each next level of artic-
ulation of his/her existence – something like Kierkegaard proposed in his three
stages of life and the discontinuous leaps between them. No, Barthes claims that
any use of signs means falling into a trap of stereotypes; I am at the same time
slave and master: I do not only repeat slavishly what was said but I also emphasize
and foreground what I am repeating.
Again comparing to Greimas: in his model such an implicit ‘fascist’ subordin-
ation of language – if he had said so! – would have been certainly the fact that
there are modalities: if we have the main phrase it is subduing the subphrase,
whose verb is thus put to a subjunctive mode reflecting this relation of subordina-
tion. That could well be seen metaphorically as a fascist phenomenon – however
Greimas did not like metaphors (and neither too strong political engagements; an
anecdote: his concept of embrayage is in English: engagement; once in a congress
where there was talk about this notion, one scholar from Eastern Europe stood
up and exclaimed: I am so glad that political engagement is finally accepted in
semiotics!).
However, Barthes’s solution to get out of the inherent fascism in language was
literature; in which we can cheat the language, by the deviations from norms (so
his view on aesthetics was essentially the same as by Eco, to whom it is the break
of norms which constitutes the aesthetic value).
But the other subversive technics is stemming from body. This aspect comes
afore particularly in Barthes’s essays on music like The Grain of the Voice,
Rasch, etc.
The central pair of notions which we find in the first-mentioned is the distinc-
tion between phenotext and genotext. This has been of course borrowed from
Julia Kristeva and her early idea on phénotexte/génotexte (who again got it from
a woman scholar in Moscow, as Ivanka Stoianova has pointed out to me, oral
communication). Phenotext of course meant the cultural codes of “civilized” style
and manners, whereas in genotext the body speaks through these cultural codes
and breaks them. In the vocal art of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau one hears according
to Barthes only the phenotext; the only singer who has grasped the Schubertian
genotext is the French tenor Charles Panzera. In his singing one hears the body,
the heart beats, muscles, the lunges. This Barthesian body is also essentially an
erotic body.
Fascinated by this distinction I tried to apply it also to other types of musical
texts coming from purely instrumental music, like in the comparison of two in-
terpretations of Chopin’s Nocturne No. 1 in B flat minor, by Arthur Rubinstein and
Samson François (Tarasti 1994: 52). It was clear to me that Rubinstein was on the
side of pheno- whereas François represented the geno-aspect of interpretation.
If in Rubinstein melody was interpreted as written without pathetic accents, with
nocturno genre as basis, emphasizing langue, then François was speech-like, with
a lot of pathetic accents – quasi parlando as Barthes would have said – with a lot of
entropy and surprise, varied touch, piece’s message as basis, emphasizing parole.
This demonstrated that the Barthesian distinction functioned even outside the
essentially corporeal vocal interpretation.
One could even see, if one like, in my existential semiotics and its dichotomy
of the spheres of Moi/Soi (see also Jacques Fontanille in his Séma et soma, Figures
du Corps) a kind of Barthesian extension. Although I provide it with a Hegelian
or philosophical tinge by stating that the Moi is the same as Being-in-Myself and
Being-for-Myself whereas the Soi was the realm of Being-for-itself and Being-in-
itself. If Moi, Being-in-and-for-Myself was the field of our corporeal ego with its
kinetic energies and impulses – i.e., Barthes’s genotexte – then the Soi as the
phenotext were the social norms as external demands and values intruding one’s
Moi, bodily existence This dichotomy is quite essential in my theory of power and
subjectivity, and the difference from Barthesian idea is that I try to see it rather as
two instances of Being, than as qualities of any fixed text or object.
In any case, in music, the existence of such corporeal signs is very evident,
not only in the sense that we can speak about musical gestures, but in the sense
that this modus influences the entire organisation of musical enunciation. In my
treatise Signs of Music I tried to pose the question: Are corporeal signs iconic? And
again I had to refer to Barthes:
Are certain qualities of the male or female body iconically represented more or less directly
by their appropriate signs? For instance are military rhythms and signs, galloping horses,
and the like conventionally masculine? When Chopin exploits such musical devices, is that
when his male body is “speaking” to us? Roland Barthes (1986) in his famous essay on
Schumann, speculated similarly, that in the rhythmic quality of Rasch the Schumannian
body starts to speak to us via its particular somathemes. Here, as with Barthes, this issue
raises many questions . . . .
(Tarasti 2002: 132–133)
In the light of existential semiotics this problem of bodily presence in music turns
into the simple question: is the Moi present in the text when the codes, stylistic
norms of the Soi are, so to say, shattering, negated, opposed? Then it would be that
only at the moments of rupture or disturbance in the normal course of musical
enunciation we can notice the presence and impact of the Moi – or the Barthesian
“body”. I am not quite sure that this is true, because there are styles which are just
based upon such ruptures, and which therefore do not any longer represent any
deviation from the Soi in favor of the Moi. For instance, in Beethoven’s Fifth sym-
phony, The Fate, in the opening motif we hear three beats and one accented longer
note. Yet the essential thing here are not these notes as such but that those three
beats are preceded by a pause of one eighth note – which causes that this figure
as such is a deviation from a perfect Gestalt, i.e., a four-eighth-note-unit. How
that gap of missing eighth note represented only by a pause is later filled is the
basic narrative device of the whole piece, its individual grammar. It would be thus
totally premature to infer that this pause would represent the principle of Moi,
the Beethovenian “subject”, the genotext, disturbance in the whole text since the
whole movement is built upon it following the norms and rules of the symphonic
genre. It is, so to say, adopted and absorbed by the genre and is thus no longer a
sign of any Beethovenian individual body behind the musical enunciation.
To return to Barthes, his British interpreter Dr. Samuels made an interesting
note on his method in the S/Z. Namely, perhaps the most significant aspect of the
method employed in S/Z is that Barthes never uses it again. (Samuels 1995: 13).
That is the true character of Barthes. The aspect which separates him from
other more passionate structuralists. Their concept of an ideal science was con-
trarily a method which was so rigorous that it made no distinction who did the
analysis, the master or the pupil: the result should be the same if the method was
right. Here the artistic aspect of Barthes is again manifest. It would be very hard
to imitate Barthesian discourse like the students often learn by repeating what
the Master did. But he is our icon and idol and classic in semiotics in another
way: first, by his exemplary attitude of uncompromising intelligence to whom
any cultural expression was worth analyzing; and second, by his creative fantasy
and imagination – which certainly also belongs to semiotics, the science we all
exercise with different approaches.
Chapter 21
The right of unfunctionality – Explorations in
Ponzio’s philosophical semiotics
Few efforts have been made to renew or even reflect upon the epistemological
bases of traditional or “classical” semiotics, established (roughly) at the begin-
ning of the twentieth century and continuing up to the present day. It seems that
traditional semiotics has accepted the normative communication model – such as
that elaborated by Shannon and Weaver to improve the efficiency of telecommu-
nication – as the self-evident starting point for any semiotic research. It requires
a semiotician with a philosophical mind to go beyond accepted truths and search
out new avenues for the study of signs.
Augusto Ponzio is one such scholar. Grounded in philosophy, he at the same
time takes a keen interest in the worldly phenomena of our Dasein, and does so
with the kind of encyclopaedic zest that characterizes the great semioticians of
our time, from Roland Barthes to Umberto Eco. Ponzio’s version of semiotics is a
fascinating combination of his roots in the line of Charles Morris/Ferruccio Rossi-
Landi, Mikhail Bakhtin’s ideas on dialogue and, perhaps above all, the “existen-
tial” philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas. Ponzio’s interest in what may be called
sociosemiotics stems from the first source, his ideas on Russian formalism from
Bakhtin, and his fundamental view of Otherness from Lévinas. It is tempting to
argue that the common point for all these sources is the notion of subject as the
primus motor of “semiosis”. Yet Ponzio turns the situation around: it is signs that
constitute subjects, not vice-versa. In this aspect of his philosophy, he shows him-
self as a semiotician. I quote:
“It is my contention that once a sign is produced it has a life of its own, independent from
the person who generated it, continues using it or interprets it: such a modality of sign life
is dialogic. From this point of view, sign dialogism constitutes a form of resistance, if not
opposition, which to the person who uses signs is more than a means through which he
manifests himself. Sign resistance is more properly designated as the semiotic materiality
which comes to be added to the mere physical materiality of nonsigns as they are trans-
formed into signs“.
(Ponzio 1993: 2)
This comes close to John Deely’s idea that signs are not things. But Ponzio con-
tinues: “Sign objectivity or semiotic materiality constitutes the otherness of signs
with respect to their producers and interpreters. The essence of the sign, its semi-
otic material, is what lies beyond the sphere of the subject . . . and figures as other”
(ibid.).
21 The right of unfunctionality – Explorations in Ponzio’s philosophical semiotics | 407
Ponzio’s statements bring to mind the early phase of Greimas’s semiotics.

In his Sémantique structurale, Greimas subordinated Georges Bernanos’s novel
Journal d’un curé de campagne to a rigorous seme-analysis and ultimately reduced
the whole novel into a Lévi-Straussian algebraic model depicting the “transform-
ations” that constitute the Bernanosian universe. However, what was forgotten in
such an extremely textual analysis was the idea of the story, which was clearly
existential in nature. The tale’s concern with subjectivity was expressed quite
cogently in Bresson’s film version of the novel. The young priest, in the novel and
the film, faces a semiotic problem: he does not understand what kind of sign he is
to his community, and this causes the failure of his idealistic “Christ” project. As
Ponzio states: “Absolute otherness is an expression of the fact that we are signs”
(ibid.: 3).
Of course, we could put the problem in another way, and claim that it is about
the alien psyche (Fremdseeligkeit). Ponzio, however, remains faithful to his soci-
osemiotic roots, and thinks in terms of signs themselves. For him, the resistant
“materiality” of signs constitutes their crucial value to genuine human dialogue.
It is signs and dialogue – i.e., semiosis – that determine the man, and not vice
versa. Here Ponzio also shows his allegiance to structuralism, which held that the
automatisms of sign systems force us to do and say things in a certain manner, if
we want to communicate.
Moreover, Ponzio’s confounding of signifier and opus connects him to a cer-
tain Marxist tradition: “Both the signifier and the opus contain a movement from
the subject, the self, from the sphere of the same to the other”. But then intervenes
the factor of ideology, central to Rossi-Landi, which inheres both in the “false
consciousness” of the subject, and also in the signs themselves and in their usage:
“Ideology is also false praxis”. Therefore semiotics cannot do, in a deeper sense,
without the study of ideology. Semiotics can of course be exercised as the mere
study of how signs function; but in doing so it remains dominated by existing
practices without ever questioning their bases. Therefore, if semiotics wants to
remain a science of the avant-garde – and in my view it should always be, para-
doxically, a kind of “continuous avant-garde” – it cannot assert its “currency”
simply by cataloguing what happens in the contemporary world, such as new
innovations in communication technology, processes of globalisation, and so on.
Semiotics must go further, and search out the often hidden ideological aspects of
those objects, which range from mobile phones to urban spaces to military forces.
There must be some intellectual moment in the semiotic discourse as such which
makes it appealing in our times.
Therefore we should not misunderstand Ponzio’s doctrine of material resist-
ance of signs. We might well hear echoes of Sartre’s “semiotics is humanism”
in the following declaration by Ponzio: “Before concerning us as specialists and
408 | 21 The right of unfunctionality – Explorations in Ponzio’s philosophical semiotics
experts, ideology concerns each and every one of us as human beings. This is
particularly significant today in view of the fact that such concepts as the crisis
of ideology or even the end of the era of ideology are now commonplace: in truth
such expressions merely confirm that a given ideology is dominating over oth-
ers, to the point of being represented as the modality of the existence of reality”
(Ponzio 1993: 9–10).
If on one hand Ponzio wants to preserve the idea of resistance of signs as
a reserve against the dangers of subjectivism – the world is not just a creation
of our mental, signifying acts – on the other hand he admits that, ultimately, it
is the perpetually rebellious subject who powers the resistance against certain
ideological practices.
In his later study, Comunicazione (1999), Ponzio delves deeper into the es-
sence of this fundamental notion of all semiotics. He starts from two premises:
Communication is being, and being is communication. In making that determin-
ation he at once seems to expand the entire semiotic project into a kind of on-
tology. Biosemiotics, which the late Thomas A. Sebeok so strongly propagated
from his own background as a zoosemiotician, claims that all organic being is
ultimately communication – a claim that many philosophers found upsetting.
One of them was the Finnish philosopher and elaborator of modal logics, Georg
Henrik von Wright – a thinker that was highly respected by Greimas and that suc-
ceeded Wittgenstein as the Chair of Philosophy at Cambridge – who said he could
not conceive of cells as in any way communicating. Evidently the problem lay in
his relatively restricted understanding of the notion of “communication”. Namely,
biosemioticians take a broader view of communication, seeing it not only as the
transmission of messages with contents, but as a process and interaction between
the organism and its Umwelt via two operations: Merken and Wirken (Jakob von
Uexküll’s terms). The organism either accepts or rejects signs coming from its
environment, which process forms the basis of its “identity”, “semiotic self”, or
Ich-Ton. Ultimately, the “being” of this organism is totally determined by the oper-
ations of Merken/Wirken, which are further undergirded by the operations of ac-
ceptance/rejection – or to put it in philosophical jargon, affirmation and negation.
Ponzio does not remain at the biological level, but moves onto the next one –
that of anthroposemiosis. Here we encounter the facts of language and speaking,
historical-social factors, and economic production. Here we might identify com-
munication with production, such that to “communicate” means participating in
the economy of production – exchange – consumption. The model of communic-
ation thus obtains a new configuration, which we may, like Ponzio, describe as
communication-production.
Of course, the notion of communicating via the exchange of objects is not
at all new (think of Malinowski’s study of the bartering systems of Trobriand
Islanders or the notion of “exchange” advanced by Marcel Mauss). But, again,

Ponzio does not stop here. He goes on to assert that not all being is commu-
nication, since the latter involves not only the category of being but also that
of becoming. He argues that to communicate does not mean to “externalise”
something that is first internal. Rather, communication begins with something
“external” then moves inward, in a kind of autoaffirmation. By what principle
does this kind of “communication” operate? Ponzio finds this question to be
uninteresting, in the limited or regional ontological sense. What is interesting
is that communication is being: “. . . if we want to venture into ontology, we can
say: being is not communicating but communicating is being” (Ponzio 1999: 7).
Can we be without communicating? Karl Jaspers asks a similar question: Why do
we communicate? Why do we not prefer to be alone? For Ponzio this fact is not
a matter of the subject’s decision or choice: we are in communication whether
we want to be or not. Hunger comes first, then the act of seeking nourishment.
Organism is communication.
This brings us to the threshold of supremely fundamental questions. Certainly
the major problem with classical semiotics, such as that of Greimas, has been its
static nature, its categorial, Cartesian thought which remains alien to the world
conceived as processes, temporalities, dynamism and action. My own efforts at
expanding Greimassian theory have gone toward supplementing and refining his
notion of being/doing with that of “becoming” (see my entry on “devenir” in Grei-
mas & Courtés 1986: 67). This led me to deal also with his semiotic square, in which
regard I was more interested in how we move from one corner to the other in the
narrative process, than in defining the precise content of each logical articulation
(i.e., s1, s2, non-s2 and non-s1). More recently I have tried to make his notion of
“being” more subtle by stratifying it into at least four aspects: being-in-myself,
being-for-myself, being-in-itself, being-for-itself – notions inspired by a certain
philosophical thread that runs from Hegel to Sartre.
The fact remains, however, that the only truly dynamic concept of standard
semiotics has been the idea of communication. We can elevate it to the status of
a first-principle, but in doing so we might risk universalizing what is ultimately
nothing but a superficial and mechanical, Shannon-Weaver model of communica-
tion. The latter always goes in the same direction, from left to the right, describing
some kind of transfer among its fixed “boxes” as the ultimate entities of commu-
nicative movement. Henri Bergson warned us early on about a view of temporality
that reduces it to a chain of discrete shifts among designated entities. He used
melody as an example: melodic motion is not only “chronological”, i.e., a chain
of successive movements from pitch to pitch; it also projects a global, phenom-
enal quality in its aspect as duration. If Ponzio hesitates to explore more deeply
the notion of “being” as “becoming”, I have recently found such investigation
to be essential in theorizing appearance (Erscheinung) as a horizontal, temporal

phenomenon.
We now come to Ponzio’s concept of alterity, or Otherness, which stems from
Lévinas. As semiotic animals we can conceive the states of the world as altern-
atives, as possibilities, we might say. It is the nature of man to think in terms of
“otherwise” (altrimenti). Ponzio concedes that human behaviour cannot be un-
derstood exclusively in terms of communication, being, and ontology. Here we
encounter the possibility of the Other:
Questa capacità di animale semiotico, di portarsi al di lá dell’essere e del mondo della comu-
nicazione lo rende assolutamente responsabile non solo della riproduzione sociale ma anche
inscindibilmente da essa della vita dell’intero planeta.
(Ponzio 1999: 10)
With that statement we have already traveled quite far from his starting point: the
materiality of signs, which constitute human subjects. After all, because subjects
are able to conceive and imagine alternatives, we are freed from the materiality
of the sign and sign-practices, which we also have the capacity to change. Does
this not constitute another type of resistance to the existing world and its ideolo-
gies of communication-production? This distinctively human situation – freedom
from necessity – is reflected in Ponzio’s nicely formulated locution: the “right of
unfunctionality”, diritto all’infunzionalità (ibid.: 30). I want to stop on this fas-
cinating concept, since I think it is the core of Ponzio’s philosophy. Here also is
where Ponzio’s philosophy comes close to existential semiotics, particularly its
latest developments (see Tarasti 2006). Let me explain why.
First of all, Ponzio’s notion of alterity, inherited from Lévinas, is almost
identical to the concept of transcendence in my own theory. Man is a transcending
animal, which simply means that we often use signs to speak about something
which is absent, but present in our minds. We may go even further and ask, Isn’t
every act of communication somehow transcendental? Even in communication
between just two speakers – say, Saussure’s Mr. A and Mr. B – there is always a
gap to be filled. When communicating we always run the terrible risk that the
other, to whom we speak, does not understand us. We always engage with an
alien psyche, knowledge of which we have only via abduction or inference (cf.
Schütz & Luckmann 1994).
The empty space between interlocutors always presents the possibility of rear-
ticulation. If we are Greimassians, we might think that this gap is filled by modalit-
ies. In which case, we would be dealing with what Ponzio calls “relative alterity”.
In contrast, “absolute alterity” surpasses even the modalities; it is a virtual uni-
verse, filled with such entities as values, ideas, presigns – anything that is not
yet fixed in the sign-objects of communication or “production” processes of our
everyday world (Dasein). It is this absolute alterity which corresponds to my own

conception of transcendence, which we can reach only via the acts of affirma-
tion and negation. This is not the same as the “smaller” transcendences of our
everyday communication, with which Saussure and Bakhtin are obviously con-
cerned in their theories of human dialogue. Schütz and Luckmann (1994) speak
of such quotidian exchanges as “middle” transcendences. But “major” transcend-
ence pertains to the whole world of possibilities, which we can conceive and be-
come aware of, and which constitute the sphere of spirit (Geist). According to
Adorno, it was in this latter sphere that art, ethics, and truth originated, such that
something non-material (Ungegenständlich) becomes actualized and objectified
in our living world (see Adorno 1993).
Ponzio’s “absolute alterity” equates to the major transcendence described by
these other theories. “Relative alterity”, by contrast, is instantiated as a social
position or role; e.g., professor, student, father, son, labourer, etc. For Hegel this
signified being für-sich-sein, i.e., as determined by society, whereas an-sich-sein
meant our being as such. I have extended Hegel’s notion by adding the principles
of Moi/Soi (cf. Ricoeur, Fontanille), and subdividing those further into four cat-
egories: being-in-myself (our individual corporeal essence) and being-for-myself
(our identities via habits), which together constitute the Moi; and being-in-itself
(i.e., norms, abstract values existing in a society) and being-for-itself (the applica-
tion of these norms in our behaviours, i.e., social practices), which together make
up the Soi. This reasoning parallels that of Ponzio, whom I quote:
L’alterità relativa è quella che fa la nostra identità, ma se per un ipotesi di “riduzione” togliamo
tutte le nostre alterità relative che costituiscono a nostra identità, non resta piu nulla o persiste
un “residuo” indipendente da esse? Ebbene, in contrasto a quanto questa forma sociale vuol
farci credere, un tale residuo sussiste, un”’alterità” non relativa che fa esistere ciascuno di
noi non semplicemente come individuo e quindi come rappresentante di un genere, di una
classe, di un insieme, e come altro a – relativamente – . . . neppure come persona, termine di
riferimento di quanto è “personale” , “appartenente”, “proprio” ma come unico, singolo, come
assolutamente altro, non sostituibile, non intercambiabile, un genere a sè, sui generis.
(Ponzio 1999: 31–32)
Is he talking here about the above-mentioned category of “being-in-myself”, i.e.,

our individual bodily – kinetic, gestural, pulsational, khoratic – existence be-
fore it becomes stabilized into what we call one’s identity? I think not. The ab-
solutely Other, as the absolutely transcendental, cannot be trapped within the
confines of the semiotic square, which portrays our subjective states within the
world of Dasein, i.e., the world of signs, object and subject, including ourselves.
Transcendence in its “major” form designates our ability to go beyond those states
or “semiotic positions”. Now, Ponzio still supposes that this absolute Alterity is
unique and singular. And that is the problem: if there is transcendence or absolute
alterity that is no longer limited to our corporeal existence as subjects, then what
can it be, epistemologically speaking? How can we communicate with it? And is
such communication even possible?
The theologians do not speak in terms of transcendence, but rather of the
supernatural, which only announces itself to us via revelation. If we are Kantian
philosophers, however, and insist on speaking about transcendence as a philo-
sophical principle, then we cannot avoid confronting the issue of proving its ex-
istence. One such proof has been offered by the Canadian philosopher Charles
Taylor, in his study The Sources of the Self, who argues that, because certain be-
haviours take place in our world which cannot be reasonably understood except
by supposing they refer to transcendence, then there must be transcendence (ab-
solute Alterity).
To pick up on my earlier reasoning: in my existential semiotics Ponzio’s idea
of absolute Alterity, is totally compatible with the notion of Transcendence. At
the same time, I admit that many problems remain open. In any case, I agree
that Alterity in that sense is always beyond the relative alterity we encounter in
our everyday life. I have suggested that the traffic between absolute Alterity (or
transcendence) be portrayed by the notion of metamodalities. These are not quite
the same as the primary modalities (will, can, must, know, believe, etc.). Rather,
metamodalities are something like metaphors of the primary ones, based on the
assumption that we are able to conceive the Cosmos, Alterity or Transcendence
only via concepts stemming from, and entering into, our own world.
The consequence which Ponzio draws from all this is simply: diritto all’in-
funzionalità – the right to stand on oneself, as a goal in itself, as an alterity that is
non-relative (Ponzio 1999: 32). And when getting to the social semiotic, he says:
“the right to unfunctionality assumes a subversive character – the unfunctional
is human. And still, human rights do not discuss the right to unfunctionality. That
would lead us to the humanism of identity. And it is the foundation of all rights of
alterity” (ibid.).
What does this mean? Certainly it comes close to the American Transcendent-
alists’ notion of quietism, or if we like, to the Heideggerian principle of Gelassen-
heit – or if we prefer to keep within semiotics, to Charles Morris’s world-view of
“letting things happen” or movement “away from” (the related motions being
“towards” or “against”). I would venture to guess that the Ponzian principle of
“unfunctionality” would not always mean isolation or separation from the world,
but rather first getting mentally freed or emancipated from it, but only in order to
be equipped for fulfilling what the subject feels to be the demands of Absolute Al-
terity, which at the same time accounts for one’s accountability to other subjects –
since our world is one of intersubjectivity and being with others.
Chapter 22
São Paulo, Helsinki, New Delhi – The life of
José Luiz Martinez
Around November 7th 2007 the internet forum Musikeion became inundated with
sorrow messages of the sudden passing away of the young Brazilian musicolo-
gist and composer José Luiz Martinez. They sounded incredible since José was
born in 1960, familiar with Indian culture and meditation, vegetarian, and of a
certain Iberian type of longevity. His colleague Professor Ricardo Monteiro later
told about a sudden attack of illness which José met when he was leaving for a
congress in Rio de Janeiro. The aforementioned Musikeion was a global discussion
network, focusing particularly on Latin America and Brazil, created by José.
It was launched in the context of the international research project Musical
Signification, which José announced at a congress of the aforementioned project
in Aix en Provence in 1998. Since I had the privilege to know José as early as from
1990 as his supervisor and older colleague, I wanted to write this small essay on
José’s life and person such as it was seen from the other side of the world, from
Finland, to which country destiny brought José for several years. These reminis-
cences are based upon the correspondence with José in the years 1990–2000.
The story starts at the beginning of 1990 when in Helsinki, just after the cel-
ebration of the University’s 350th anniversary, a letter arrived from São Paulo, rua
Dionisio da Costa. It began:
“I am a Brazilian musician, very interested in music semiotics and developing research

under tutorship of Prof. Lucia Santaella at Pontificia Universidade Catolica in São Paulo
(PUC-SP). Graduated as a Music Bachelor I am going to get the Master’s degree in Semiotic
and Communication in the beginning of 1991. I would like to discuss with you some points
of my researchy and to ask you some questions about Helsinki University Department of
Music . . . ”
And then he continued:
“But first, I would like to present myself. I started studying classical music about 20 years
ago (at the age of 10 years). My first instrument was the Guitar, in which I have reached
a good level of ability . . . . Then, I worked on various kinds of musical activities, such as
chamber music (ancient to contemporary) . . . The discovery of the contemporary music led
me trying to write compositions . . . I wrote about 20 pieces, some of them were performed
at new music festivals in Brazil. Nowadays I could introduce myself as a composer, guitarist
and percussionist. Furthermore I have been more and more interested in theoretical issues
in music. Soon I got a grant to develop research. My first subject was the art music of India . . .
this research resulted in a book that I named: Classical Indian Music: Theory and Practice . . .
414 | 22 São Paulo, Helsinki, New Delhi – The life of José Luiz Martinez
However my interest reached also practice. . . I was enraptured by the sound of Tabla drums.
Fascinated by the Indian music I tried to get a scholarship to study in India but I was not
accepted for the Master’s . . .
Actually, music semiotics is not only a personal choice, As you have written, music in the
20th century is a very wide field, displayed in a multitudinal of forms, styles and traditions.
Their ways of signification are very particular, but I have not found a really complete sig-
nification theory designed for music. . . But I am quite disappointed (!) that few scholars
have considered in depth the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. . . . Studies that borrow some
Peircean concepts usually apply them to music in an isolated way (sometimes naively) . . .
Nowadays I am trying to develop that which some day (I hope) could be a Peircean theory
of musical semiosis . . . ”
At the end José asked for my opinion on these plans and some articles which I had
written.
On July 17, José wrote again:
“I became very happy after reading your answer to my “long letter”. Your words sounded
really optimistic to a third world student. I hope I could correspond worthily . . . I do am
seriously interested in forwarding my studies abroad. There are three places that I think it
would be ideal places – Helsinki University interest me specially . . . it looks me as a place to
grow a strong base. The second place is, of course, some Indian University (I have a contact
at Banaras Hindu University), where I could get first hand material as treatises and contact
with living masters of classical Indian music. The third place is indeed Bloomington, as
the ‘Mecca’ of all Peircean scholars. I was happily surprised when you indicated prof Lewis
Rowell as an expert in Indian music. . . Well, Helsinki, India, Bloomington . . . it sounds really
ambitious! Actually I do not have rich parents and I and my wife are making our living only
through a state scholarship earned . . . It is possible but not easy, to get help from Brazilian
institutions for the Doctoral research abroad . . . that is my hope.”
In fact, José realized later all what he planned as early as then: he came from São
Paulo to Helsinki in order to become a PhD in Indian music – an example of truly
international student mobility in our days. But also an illustration of extremely
clear goals and strong determination. In the same summer José sent his paper
Musica & Semiotica: Uma teoria peirceana for my reading; he had held it as a
communication on Aug. 28, 1990 at the congress of Brazilian semioticians in Porto
Alegre. To that theoretical foundation José in this speech had offered, i.e., how to
apply Peirce’s sign categories to music, he remained faithful for his entire life.
On Dec. 10, José’s “Finnish” plan was so far that he knew which documents
he would need at the University of Helsinki and in Finland in order to apply for
the grant of FAPESP. He asked for advice on whether he should concentrate theor-
etically in three cases of Peirce’s sign categories, i.e., musical signs in themselves,
their relationships to the objects, or their relations to interpretants. As the second
alternative he saw the study of semiotico-structural grounds of music: random-
ness, functionality, and convention. At the same time, he kept the idea to study
Indian music via Sanskrit sources. He also planned for composing studies at Si-
belius Academy.
On Dec. 18, José already had an invitation to the international doctoral sem-
inar of musical semiotics in Helsinki, and he thought to study listening, perform-
ing and analysing of music according to Peirce’s logics.
On March 6 José already knew that he would do musical semiotics just in
connection to the Indian traditional music. He inquired about possible India spe-
cialists in Helsinki, of which I had mentioned to him Professors Simo and Asko
Parpola. José later chose their courses. But an enormous amount of documents
and applications were needed before all this became reality. We had spoken on
the telephone but I always wanted to see in person a student before accepting
him as doctoral student.
On July 10, 1992 José could announce that the Brazilian Ministry had granted
him an award for doctoral studies in Finland. Three days later he had received by
mail the first issue of Acta Semiotica Fennica. In August José said that he would ar-
rive in Finland at the beginning of September. Before this José attended São Paulo’s
28th Musica nova festival with a composition to the memory of John Cage in which
an untuned tambura was tuned during 4󸀠 33󸀠󸀠 , pitches could be tones C, A, G and E.
José arrived in Finland and found soon his home at Vironkatu, in that five-
floor turn of the century building in which the Department of Musicology had
been settled since the 1960s. It became his fortress for years since he did not return
home but four years later when his whole ‘project’ was completed. In Finland he
met other difficulties, that is true, like continuous renovations of his visa at the
Foreigners’ Office, for which one needed again reference letters. But José also util-
ized his stay in Europe and travelled with his wife Cisa a.o. in Greece and Germany
(post card from Athens in Sept. 14, 1993).
José sent at the beginning of June to me a copy of a letter from Lew Rowell, the
leading American specialist of Indian music in which Rowell broadly commented
on José’s ideas. Rowell discussed José’s theories on rasa and raga, two central
genres of Indian classical music, which José wanted to study. The most important
for Rowell was ‘insider’s perspective’ on Indian music – to the extent it is possible
for a foreigner. In other words, Rowel said, emic information is better than etic for
your purposes. But he also warned:
You will not find Indian musicians and thinkers sympathetic to your project: it may even
be better not to tell them what you have in mind. A more general problem may lie in the
following: Peirce’s approach to analysis, as I understand it, is based on the recognition of
oppositions. This is very foreign to the Indian way of thinking, which is inclusive – not
exclusive . . . Indian logic has no difficulty in accepting propositions that both are and are
not true.
In August perpetual worries about visas now concerning José’s wife continued,
and again we had to make telephone calls. In the meantime I visited Bayreuth and
José greeted me by letter by saying: Hopefully Wotan inspired your trip! Otherwise
José did not accept to call his professor by first name in the Nordic manner but
called me systematically “Sir”.
In 1994 José was already going to India and asked for recommendations for
Professor Emerita Sarma to Banaras Hindu University. He intended to stay there
as a visiting scholar. In March José introduced me to a paulista composer Mario
Ficarelli who prepared a doctoral thesis on Sibelius’s symphonies. In Finland the
Niilo Helander Foundation supported José.
In July José wrote to be ready for India. He also answered to my questions
about the notion of existence in Peirce. Peirce’s view radically differed from that of
Sartre. The existing world was for Peirce a real world, that which is independent
from our mind and thought. The best book written about it was by Ivo Ibri, in
Portuguese, he said.
In December José was already in India and now followed perhaps the most
interesting part of our correspondence, José’s travel descriptions.
He wrote on Dec. 12, 1994:
“I have been in Delhi for almost three months now. I have to say, that I am very happy. Well,
the city is indeed big and “intoxicating” as Lewis Rowell put it. I had almost forgotten how is
the big city living style, so used I have got to the calmness and facilities of Helsinki. But, after
the second month, I get into the Indian mood, and started enjoying everyday life, paying not
too much attention to the difficulties. There are lots of pleasant situations, such as, the sight
of an elephant walking slowly among the cars in the large avenues of New Delhi, or snake
charmers playing not for tourists but in typical poor Indian areas. And, of course, wonderful
concerts and dance recitals!
You can guess that I am usually considered Indian by the people here. I am not even harassed
by the tourist traps and their touts. I can go everywhere, even in the old town, and I feel safe.
This would be a great advantage for an ethnomusicologist, but my Hindi is still too poor to
follow the native speakers. I have Hindi class twice a week, though.”
José had met great musicians like Mrs. Mukerhjee, Mrs. Brhaspati and the Dagar
brothers, famous drhupad singers. But he admitted having encountered one prob-
lem in his project.
It had been difficult to collect signs that would support his theory. One
source were the songs, from which he could draw musical meanings from texts –
Mrs. Brahspati for instance told that lovers’ separation was expressed by leaps
in the melody, and union was signified by melodies running in close intervals.
But it would last years to gather such examples. Therefore José decided to put
some key questions such as: Are there in Indian music instances of birdsong?
Where, when, and how? Are there in Indian music instances of numerical or
geometrical relations? Are there in Indian music instances of quotations or

parodies concerning folk music, pop music, film music, or even Western music?
Yet these concerned only the issue of icons. But José thought that indices and
symbols were much easier to find.
Altogether, Jose wanted to stay in India for a longer time in order to travel
there and get more information about playing – although he first had to repeat
only some basic figures.
José wrote a kind of travel diary or essays entitled “Fieldwork” and asked
where it could be published. I do not know if it has appeared anywhere but in
any case it contains funny personal experiences. A.o. he tells about his visit at a
tabla class by his teacher Probir:
“To begin . . . we have to jump in the bus, since the driver rarely stops completely the de-
crepit vehicle, he merely slows it a bit. In the bus I am almost perfectly disguised as an
Indian, thanks to my DNA heritage (a kind of artificial synthesis, since my parents have
Portuguese and Spanish ancestors). However. my worst weakness is my quite poor Hindi,
and my clothes, nothing special but still outstandingly neat and Western among the humble
Indian urban buss travelers.
José tells that many musicians live in Lakshmi town, an area in New Delhi, in
which rent is cheap. But the place’s name was ironic. Lakshmi is the goddess of
fortune, wife of Vishnu, the dreamer and creator of the universe.
“However, the area is very poor . . . In the street, walkable now, according to my guru-bhai
(colleagues, disciple of the same teacher, Olivier), since during the rains they are full of
mud and dejects, we meet cycle and scooter rickshaw, cows and buffaloes, among the small
Japanese cars, and motorized vehicles of all kinds . . . ”
This is modern India, not the one of tourists.

José also portrays his lessons and Probir asks him to forget everything from
his previous style, since his fingers’ placement and attacks were not correct. At
the end Probir asked him to bring a tape recorder. “My latent ethnomusicologist
was surprised with the request, to which I promptly agreed. Probit checks the
equipment ready, what a surprise! The tape supposed to be an ethnomusicological
document is actually to work as a mirror of his tabla development. The tape had
purely didactic purposes.” José is really happy for this opportunity to learn from
original tradition, it is inestimable.
But he had adventures during his return home from Probir’s. He heard a voice
calling insistently:
“Abhai-sahab, bhai-sahab” (brother-sir). Realizing that it meant him, José
stopped and saw a policeman, with his chaqui clothes and a turban, indicating
quite probably the man being a Sikh.
“He starts speaking Hindi and I immediately make clear that I do not understand. Situation
is strange and irregular. In a poor English the man asks me a few questions concerning my
activities there. Soon people start to gather around me and I explain that I am merely a tabla
student, and my teacher lives there. He seems to be satisfied and explains me that he is
encharged of that area, so he has to make questions to strangers.
The situation looks to be over and I restart my way . . . what a surprise when I am again called
by the same policeman, just a few seconds after. Now I start to feel nervous and cannot the
insistent question the policeman puts me: Cream name, cream name! It sounds me nonsense
and I think perhaps he is actually questioning about some crime . . . ”
But then José starts to understand:
“Cream – do you want to know what perfume I wear? Yes that was it!. Situation now is
unbelievably comic. Relieved I tell the man which perfume brand I was wearing and thinking
about the different weight Indian people probably puts on sense as smell, perhaps not as
much important in the West, I continue . . . ”
In January José writes from Tanjore, Southern India, where he has seen beautiful
old monuments, Buddhist, Hindu and Islamic. Then he is on a journey to Madras.
On July 23, 1996 José is back again in Helsinki and lives in the center at
Telakkakatu. Earlier he lived in Koivukylä, a suburb area, but once when returning
home he was hit by a group of skinheads, lost his passport and pocket book. This
made him move downtown. He had received prolongation to his grant from Brazil
in order to continue to his defense in December. He was worried about the defense
date, but Lew Rowell was arriving as his opponent. He planned it for December 7,
just after the Finnish independence day, when his mother was going to visit him.
José wished me a good trip to Brazil where I was going for a South American
tourney. He said, after so many years you would not recognize the country as the
same.
On March 4 the Faculty of the Arts gave its printing permission for José’s thesis
on the basis of the reports by Professors Erkki Pekkilä and Lew Rowell. Pekkilä
said in his report that the candidate had become familiar with Indian music over
ten years and studied it here, and thus he had intrinsic knowledge about it. But his
work was not empirical description but theoretical contribution to the discourse of
musical semiotics, as Pekkilä emphasized. Lew Rowell again said the dissertation
was rich in ideas, brilliantly interpreted, and clearly organized. The candidate
appeared to be equally at home in the intricate ideological distinctions of Peirce’s
thought and the sensuous world of Indian music. In my experience, it is rare to
find a work of scholarship that brings together such diverse fields of study in such
a successful manner.
José’s dissertation appeared in the series Acta Semiotica Fennica as
volume V – but only some years later José still wrote (Jan. 14, 2000) that one
Indian publisher was interested in it, namely Motilal Banaridas. When José had
visited New Delhi, he had noticed dozens of bookshops, all of them full of Indian
publications in English and other languages, and crowded with people searching
for books. I am sure that the book will be widely read there. Therefore he asked
for copyrights from us – which were of course given to him. So José’s ideas have
expanded even in India.
On July 28, 1997 José sent a card from São Paulo, from rua Dionisio da Costa,
where he had returned after his years of apprenticeship. The circle had been
closed.
Nevertheless, José did not stay outside the community of music semioticians.
He attended as far as I know all major events of Musical Signification in various
sides of Europe. Above all he created the internet discussion group Musikeion,
which particularly oriented Brazilian music scholars to semiotics. José got a
postdoctoral researcher post at São Paulo University, but obviously the life in
Brazil with such a highly specialised field of study was not quite rosy. But with his
gentle character, perfect mastering of himself in all situations, his seriousness,
kindness, and mild temperament – which however contained a steely willpower
to realize his plans – Jose managed his life.
José’s unexpected passing away was a big loss to the international musical
semiotics. It feels strange to remember now how only one day before he sent mes-
sages to his friends at Musikeion, who via Jose learned about international events.
But if we believe in the old Indian myth and wisdom of “agasha” – i.e., that noth-
ing disappears in the universe – then José’s memory will maintain still a long
time – at least in the minds of those who had the joy to know him.
|
Part VI: Practice
Chapter 23
Can Semiotics be organized? Observations over
a 40-year period
23.1 Introduction
Any effort to portray the life of the semiotician since the gradual institutionaliza-
tion of our discipline – with all its phases, turns, changes, stabilities – can be done
only from a subjective point of view; all depends on who is viewing things and
which position he/she occupies in the international semiotic movement. So, per-
sonally I have considered semiotics since the beginning, i.e., the moment I could
join it, a great intellectual challenge – and adventure. Administration of semiotic
issues is never an easy project: how could one manage, master, control people
who are proper specialists in these fields knowing in advance how anyone is ma-
nipulated or guided. However, science is always also a social enterprise including
communities and interaction. It is not only cerebral activity, it does not mean that
one is closed into a monastery to write the chronicle of the world, like the monk
Pimen in Boris Godunov’s first act.
Also, some scholars are more inclined than others to organize and administer
things. Greimas once told me that my case was rare, since I tried to be active
both in organizing and publishing. For a professor getting involved in administra-
tion, especially in our days, also can be dangerous. Almost all colleagues whom
I know and have done this transfer have adopted another identity altogether. They
hardly say good morning to their former colleagues, they identify themselves with
those politicians, administrators, and businessmen who nowadays crowd the Uni-
versity Boards. Since my experience stems from a position as a professor in the
European Union I guess it is the same elsewhere in this territory. Often those col-
leagues are recruited to organization and administration whose cognitive forces
have shrunk in science itself, and they want to show their competence instead by
ruling others. That provides one with an illusion of a very important activity. This
is a very general phenomenon anticipated in fact a long time ago by the American
philosopher Josiah Royce when he argued that of three persons A, B, and C the
most important is B, who is ‘only’ mediating, transmitting, managing between act-
ors A and C. Yet, maybe organizing things is a kind of passion of the human mind
à la Charles Fourier; it is an unavoidable trait in one’s nature if one is born with
it. Anyway, I want to tell you here my ‘story’ and summarize my experiences on
organizing semiotics during a rather long time in a human life. Now I have directed
the IASS, the ISI at Imatra, and am chairing the international research project with
424 | 23 Can Semiotics be organized? Observations over a 40-year period
600 members entitled Musical Signification and the Semiotic Society of Finland.
All these semiotic corporations are completely different by their nature, structure
and functioning. This is the empirical background and basis for my observations.
23.2 Beginning: Lévi-Strauss, Greimas . . . and Paris
In fact, it all started very early. I was 22 years old when I happened to read a tiny
book by Claude Lévi-Strauss entitled Myth of Asdiwal, as a Swedish translation.
Suddenly a new world opened to me: this was for me! I had before studied philo-
sophy and music, and just started, after military service, with social sciences; they
had become fashionable among young intellectuals around the year 1968. Lévi-
Strauss opened semiotics to me, but then it was called structuralism.
However, I soon noticed that there was no semiotics at all yet in my surround-
ings. If I planned to write, speak or publish something about it, the first task was
to create a surrounding community which would understand such issues. So was
launched a reading circle or study group of young students of sociology, philo-
sophy and arts at Helsinki University. It started to call itself a ‘structuralism group’.
It convened almost weekly at my home. We read difficult French and Italian texts
as Swedish translations, Umberto Eco’s La struttura assente as Den frånvarande
strukturen, etc. Many of us had been active in student movements of those days
with a Marxist orientation; for such members structuralism meant some disasso-
ciation from that type of intellectual analysis towards a more ‘modern’ approach.
Also phenomena hitherto considered improper for an academic discourse were
made acceptable by a structuralist approach, as Roland Barthes by his studies on
modern myths had shown. On the other hand, also high culture phenomena such
as Wagner, Goethe, etc. became open for a student of social sciences. Altogether
a fascinating new world opened to young minds in the North.
Yet, the first place where I saw organized semiotic teaching was in Paris,
where I left for doctoral studies under direction of A. J. Greimas. As a Lithuanian
he willingly accepted me in his famous seminars which often gathered 100–200
students of semiotics, particularly from Italy and Latin America. From the Nordic
countries only Denmark was represented by several students and by me, the only
one from Finland. The seminars were the regular basis for the whole future Paris
school. They were not only students but teachers and scholars in general who
came there to meet and talk about semiotic theories. That seemed to me an ideal
body of semioticians.
Nevertheless, I felt myself totally marginal, I did not make friends with any of
the participants and also soon noticed that I very little understood what was said
there. Therefore, I decided to translate into Finnish the Sémantique structurale
23.3 The Impact of Thomas A. Sebeok | 425
by Greimas in order to step into the system, so to say. I also followed lectures
at Collège de France by Lévi-Strauss and by Michel Foucault; I twice met Roland
Barthes, but when he heard I was in the seminar by Greimas he lost his interest.
However, morally the most important and encouraging encounter in Paris
for me was meeting with Claude Lévi-Strauss, the great idol of my young years.
It was characteristic of Parisian life that it was possible even for a young 23-year-
old student from the North to have an appointment with a great academician. It
was helped by our common acquaintance, Professor Elli-Kaija Köngäs-Maranda,
the Finnish anthropologist and colleague of Lévi-Strauss, who was then at Laval
University in Canada. I particularly remember the following: when I said to Lévi-
Strauss that the structuralism of such a small country like Finland could be
only a reflection of such a center as Paris, he interrupted me: “No – the center
is always where you are yourself!” My meeting of Parisian scholars was helped
by a Bureau d’accueil for foreign visiting scholars which existed at that time at
Blvd St. Germain; the lady there was most helpful and organized for me all these
meetings.
Under these conditions Paris, especially the address 10 rue Monsieur le
Prince, the office of Greimas, became the center for my semiotic work. I knew
that I could always meet him there on Thursday afternoon when he was having
his reception. When I returned from Brazil from one year’s study journey in 1976,
I passed by his room and he said: Vous êtes devenu un grand voyageur interna-
tional. In 1978 I defended my thesis on Myth and Music at Helsinki University,
not in Paris, although Greimas had been so kind to propose it, promising that he
would check my French writing.
23.3 The Impact of Thomas A. Sebeok
Immediately thereafter started the organizing of semiotics in Finland. In May 1979

there gathered at Helsinki University Department of Musicology six persons de-
ciding to found the Semiotic Society of Finland. They were Henri Broms, Juhani
Härmä, Osmo Kuusi, Erkki Pekkilä and me. I started to write regular membership
letters. Later Vilmos Voigt, who soon became our honorary member – and who
in fact had given as early as in 1973 the first course on semiotics at University of
Helsinki – noticed that Finnish society was rare in the world since all its activities
had been well documented since the beginning.
The year 1979 was decisive in the organizing of semiotics in many senses. The
IASS/AIS had its second world congress of semiotics in Vienna in the summer. It
was preceded by a smaller precongress organized by Voigt and Hungarian semioti-
cians, like Mihály Hoppál, in Budapest on semiotic methodologies. I left there with
my students; I had got my first post as associate professor of musicology at Hel-

sinki University. The Vienna congress was the first really big congress I attended.
It was opened by President Kirchschläger, and the old halls of Vienna University
were filled with famous semioticians. I was introduced to Umberto Eco by Voigt.
However, in Budapest I had met already an older (as it seemed to me) gen-
tleman who looked like a mixture of Sigmund Freud and the Austrian Emperor,
namely Thomas A Sebeok. This started a long friendship which has echoes pre-
cisely in semiotic organizations until now.
Sebeok was from the Bloomington campus of Indiana University, to which he
remained faithful through all his life. But his background was a Finno-Ugrian one,
since he had studied the Tcheremiss mythology and language even by empirical
field work at Volga in Russia after the war, and also made excursions to Finland
and Lapland. He had published in 1947 a study book called Spoken Finnish for the
US Army. He had chosen Finno-Ugrian studies as early as at Chicago University
where his teacher recommended it as a test: if he could manage the Finnish lan-
guage he could well become an anthropologist! So practically he spoke Finnish
and knew leading Finnish linguists and folklorists of the time. This background
was later often forgotten in the US and international semiotic circles. He was the
organizer of the international semiotic movement more than anyone else. He cre-
ated the platforms for others to appear, publishing series at Mouton, Indiana Uni-
versity Press, etc.
Sebeok immediately took my thesis Myth and Music and published it as a
reprint in his series Approaches to Semiotics. Then he invited me to attend in
October 1979 three symposia in Bloomington: a Polish American symposium in
logics with a Polish ten-person delegation led by Jerzy Pelc, the President of the
IASS (I had met him as a student several times before at University of Helsinki dur-
ing his guest lectures), the Charles S. Peirce Society symposium and the Annual
meeting of the American Semiotic Society. This was also my first trip to the US.
I was totally enchanted by the campus of Bloomington, in the deep Midwest
of America, not only thanks to semiotics and the famous Research Center for Lan-
guage and Semiotic Studies but also due to the famous School of Music. I remem-
ber the dinner at Memorial Union, with the presence of Umberto Eco, John Deely,
Brook Williams, Beatriz Garza Cuaron and many others, hosted by the legendary
Dean of the University, Herman B. Wells; with his enormous status he seemed
to me like the symbol of all America and its good sides. One of the reasons for
Sebeok’s success was that he enjoyed full support all his life from the direction of
his university. Later experience has shown me that without such an establishment
it is impossible to foster semiotics successfully.
Upon invitation by Sebeok I then attended in consecutive years several an-
nual meetings of the Semiotic Society of America, the next one in 1980 at Texas
23.4 Semiotics expands | 427
Tech University in Lubbock, then in Buffalo at SUNY and then in San Francisco,
California. This was very important not only due to the contact with American
scholars but also because I learned how to organize such meetings. The model
of these conventions I could then move to my own Finnish symposia with their
structure, business lunch meetings, elections, exhibitions, plenary speeches, etc.
That was my school of organizing semiotics.
23.4 Semiotics expands
I started to organize in Finland the annual meetings of the Finnish Semiotic So-
ciety. The first major one was realized at Jyväskylä University in Middle Finland,
where I was holding my first chair of arts education in 1979–1983. This happened
in the summer of 1983, and A. J. Greimas arrived there with a group of French
colleagues such as François Delalande, Eric Landowski and Serge Martin. Grei-
mas’s lecture Vers la troisième révolution sémiotique was videofilmed and is now
available on DVD from the ISI, Imatra. This is noteworthy since there are not many
film documents about him anywhere. (In fact Greimas had already in 1979 visited
Helsinki University for the first time, but that was not filmed.)
I have to mention here that sometimes I felt my position as a friend and col-
league of Greimas and Sebeok at the same time rather awkward. As known, they
were not on good terms. Sebeok called Greimas a ‘lexicographist’ and was op-
posed to his school absolutely and had an anti-French attitude altogether. Grei-
mas, on the other hand, said once when I came from Bloomington to Paris: “Les
américains n’ont pas fait beaucoup de progrès. Ils n’étudient que les chimpanzés”.
Greimas was a little sorry that I had established such close contacts with Indiana
University. But for Sebeok his Finnish connection was important. I was proud
when I noticed that in his fax machine he had the direct line only to Eco and me
in the first place. To defend Sebeok one has to say that in spite of all, he published
English translations of Greimas’s works in his series.
Via Sebeok I met also John Galman, director of Indiana University Press. He
was an intellectual who favored semiotics. So the IU press became also my pub-
lisher together with whom we published some issues of Acta Semiotica Fennica,
our international series which we had launched in Finland.
In 1983 also the IASS had its third world congress in Palermo under Prof. But-
titta, which many Finns attended. Moreover, in the same year Sebeok organized
in Estoril, Portugal his Advanced Studies Institute with the topic “Semiotics –
Language of international scholarship” funded by NATO. In the same year Norma
Tasca together with her husband, Minister José Seabra, had been establishing the
Semiotic Society of Portugal; they were running a journal, Cruzeiro semiotico. Any-
way, in that summer course there were more teachers than students since it had
been announced only in the magazine National Geographic. Itamar Even-Zohar,
from Israel, and myself were the only persons from non-NATO countries.
In these years we also established regular contacts with Estonia. I visited there
for the first time in 1982 at a symposium in Tallinn organized by the Estonian Insti-
tute for Language and Literature. The main protagonist was then its vice-director
Mart Remmel, an extremely intelligent mathematician and semiotician, interested
in computers. It was not possible at that time to visit Tartu, a closed city under the
Soviets; so the first time we met Yuri Lotman was in 1987 when he came for his visit
to Helsinki University together with his student Igor Czernov. From his school we
had had Boris Gasparov as lecturer of Russian language as early as in the times
of our student structuralism group in the early 1970s. Later students of semiotics
from Tartu often visited Helsinki with their teachers Peeter Torop and Kalevi Kull.
Other Estonian intellectuals such as Aivo Lõhmus and the composer Leo Normet
were also frequently with us. However, semiotics as a discipline to be taught was
not in the mind of Lotman. He told me in Helsinki that he had almost no Estonian
students. This was perhaps due to fact that KGB did not allow them to attend his
courses. Lotman was persecuted by, among others, Endel Sõgel, the communist
director of the Estonian Language Institute in Tallinn; he was isolated in Estonia
as a Jew and as a Russian. Yet, one has to notice here that neither did Sebeok
ever aim for MA or PhD programs in semiotics in his own Indiana University. He
said that masters or doctors of semiotics would have no jobs in the US. So he was
satisfied with his other international activities.
23.5 Imatra starts: Founding of the ISI
Something very important happened in Finland in the organizations in 1986,

when from a relatively unknown small town in our Eastern borderline, Imatra,
came to Helsinki the director of the local Summer University, Pentti Rossi. To-
gether with Henri Broms, Vice-President of our society, docent of Persian language
and Head Librarian of the School of Business in Helsinki he organized days
of ‘effective administration’ in Imatra. Next, Broms got the idea: why not do
there a symposium on semiotics. The local Mayor, Kalervo Aattela, was in favor,
and so in 1986 the first semiotic convention took place at the Imatra Cultural
Center in its brand new white ‘palace’ of culture on the river Vuoksi, close to
the rapids. The place which had been Finland’s most visited tourist attraction
for centuries – when the whole Russian court of Catherine the Great would come
from St Petersburg to see the waterfall – was again receiving international guests.
23.5 Imatra starts: Founding of the ISI | 429
Sebeok was of course invited, and soon the State Hotel, Valtionhotelli, an art
nouveau castle, became a center of semioticians as well.
In this first semiotic congress in Imatra, there also participated the research
group on musical semiotics called Musical Signification, which had been estab-
lished in Paris in a direct broadcast at French Radio with six scholars: Costin
Miereanu, François Delalande, Gino Stefani, Marcello Castellana, Luiz Heitor
Corrêa de Azevedo and me. After this important radio program about musical
semiotics I told Greimas about our plans to establish the Laboratoire européen
pour les études en signification musicale – which title had been invented by
Marcello Castellana, a Sicilian student of Greimas; he said: Take its organization
to Finland! We here in Paris are a little Bohemian, it would not survive here. So
I did and the first symposium in Imatra was attended by such eminent scholar
of musical semiotics as Daniel Charles, Márta Grabócz, Ivanka Stoianova, Vladi-
mir Karbusický, Jaroslav Jiránek and Iegor Reznikoff. Now the project has over
600 members and has held 13 international symposia in many European towns
and 12 international doctoral and postdoctoral schools of musical semiotics at
Helsinki University and Imatra.
In the summer congress of 1987 the previous members of the Tartu-Moscow
school met in Imatra in a commemorative symposium. Lotman could not come
himself but instead many members living in diaspora came, such as Alexander
Piatogorsky, Boris Oguibenin, Ann Shukman. Thomas Sebeok was of course also
present and spoke about primary and secondary modeling systems. Also such
famous scholars as Roland Posner and Masao Yamaguchi attended as well as
Vilmos Voigt and Mihály Hoppál.
Yet, alongside this meeting convened also for the first time the Nordic Associ-
ation of Semiotics. This was the first all-Nordic symposium, for which especially
the semioticians from Norway were active. The Dutch semiotician of translation
Dinda L. Gorlée was there, and among founders of the association were Drude von
der Fehr, Elena Hellberg, Sven Storelv, Jørgen Langdahlen, from Norway, Jørgen
Dines Johansen, Svend Erik Larsen and Peter Brask from Denmark. A magazine
was established also, entitled SEMIONORDICA.
One of the decisive years in all these organizations was 1988. It was the year of
founding of the International Semiotics Institute or ISI. The Canadian semiotician
Paul Bouissac, who in Toronto was running his famous summer schools for struc-
tural and semiotic studies, which always lasted one full month, had got the idea to
establish an institute to supervise the education of young semioticians and their
teaching globally. There had to be a place where one could know everything that
happened in semiotics in the whole world; a database from which students would
learn where to go in order to specialize in diverse fields of semiotics. He had built
a collegium of 44 scholars behind this enterprise, but it was certainly Sebeok’s
initiative which brought the founding meeting to Imatra. The candidates for the
presidency of the ISI were Paul Bouissac and Roland Posner, but in the end I was
elected. Finnish media followed this event closely; big articles were published
in the main newspaper of the country Helsingin Sanomat, and it was mentioned
in the news of TV channel 1. The international scholars who constituted the
collegium were Lisa Block de Behar, Paul Bouissac, Maria Lucia Santaella Braga,
José Romero Castillo, Igor Czernov, Jean-Claude Gardin, Beatriz Garza Cuaron,
Dinda L. Gorlée, Claudio Guerri, Yoshihiko Ikegami, Jørgen Dines Johansen, Wal-
ter A. Koch, Alexandros-Phaidon Lagopoulos, You-Zheng Li, Dean MacCannell,
Jacques Moeschler, Michael O’Toole, Rik Pinxten, Roland Posner, Debi Prasama
Pattanayak, Monica Rector, Joëlle Rethoré, Fernande Saint-Martin, Thomas A.
Sebeok, Ropo Sekoni, Ann M. Shukman, R. N. Sriwastava, György Szépe, Eero
Tarasti, Terry Threadgold, Colwyn Trevarthen, Salvato Trigo, Patrizia Violi, Vilmos
Voigt, Gloria Withalm and Masao Yamaguchi. Moreover, Peter Stockinger was
nominated assistant to the President and Henri Broms director of the database.
The goals of the Institute were defined as follows (the text written by Paul
Bouissac): “First, it will establish an international database of all advanced teach-
ing and research centers relevant to semiotics; the database should contain in-
formation on programs offered by other institutes and universities, conditions of
admission, bursaries, grants and fellowships; second, it will facilitate mobility
of the students; thirdly it will sponsor and organize interdisciplinary conferences
workshops, courses and seminars in cooperation with the IASS.” In order to fulfil
these tasks there were seven so-called regional centers for geographical areas.
Australia, Eastern Europe, Japan and East Asia, Latin America, North America,
Western Europe. Each center was supposed to gather information and send regu-
larly to the ISI which was established in Imatra.
Such was the ambitious plan. In fact, it was never literally enacted. The idea of
regional centers proved to be not realistic, some data were gathered but the Imatra
center did not receive information from regional centers as planned. However,
when this was noticed, then the ISI started to function on its own, fulfilling the
third paragraph of its goals, i.e., international symposia. In this manner Imatra
became one of the well-known international centers of semiotic congresses and
activities. It continued in these lines until the present. It had the summer congress
every early June (it was moved from July in order to avoid coincidence with Urbino
summer schools). In 2014 it was moved from Imatra to Kaunas Technological Uni-
versity where Dario Martinelli continues as its director.
A little later, when the Toronto Semiotic Circle was no longer willing to
continue their Summer schools for structural and semiotic studies, this institution
was shifted to Imatra, whose summer congress, however, always lasted only one
week. Canadian students of Marcel Danesi came often to these events. For the
23.6 IASS Continues | 431
Finnish audience the ISI started to organize winter schools in early February,
amidst the hard Finnish winter. They became immediately very popular and ex-
panded knowledge about the Institute in Finland, which was of course important
for funding.
The Ministry of Education started to fund the ISI upon the initiative of Min-
ister Riitta Uosukainen, who was from Imatra. Also the City of Imatra continued
funding under its Mayors Tauno Moilanen during ten years and Pertti Lintunen.
The Institute survived the period of recession in the early 90s. Yet, it did not en-
dure during the present crisis because its funding was finished by the Ministry of
Education.
23.6 IASS Continues
In the meantime, the IASS continued to function. When Cesare Segre left the Pres-
idency the new President was elected, and he was Jerzy Pelc. After him Roland
Posner got the post and held it for two four-year periods. During his time the secret-
ariat was situated also in the German speaking area, namely in Vienna, thanks to
Jeff Bernard and Gloria Withalm. They expanded remarkably the scope of the soci-
ety, and specified its statutes. In addition to an Executive Committee consisting of
national representatives from each country, 1–2 persons, it included professional
institutes and others. An information bulletin was published regularly. The IASS
saw the rise of new continents in semiotics, particularly Latin America. After my
student time in Brazil in 1976, I visited again during a tour of Latin America in 1996
and lectured in Buenos Aires, Santiago de Chile, Lima and Santos and São Paulo.
The width and scope of semiotics in Latin America was really outstanding. Also
Mexico was tremendously active. IASS also started to foster congresses and sym-
posia “under auspices of the IASS” and created formal criteria for such affiliation.
The IASS general assemblies reflected the strong passions semiotics evoked
among different groups, schools and scholars. In the Barcelona/Perpignan con-
gress, which was the first two-city world congress in the history of the IASS, the
assembly had to decide about the next place. Berkeley, California was elected
under direction of Irmengard Rauch. When the Berkeley congress was held it was
the first time the world congress took place outside of Europe. That was in 1988.
Again the next meeting place had to be chosen. The Latin Americans and many
others strongly supported Guadalajara as the congress site. Sebeok and some oth-
ers proposed Helsinki. In the dramatic election Guadalajara won and so Latin
America gained its first world congress. At the same time in Monterrey, Mexico,
Pablo Espinosa Vera organized a convention he called the First World Congress of
Semiotics and Communication, and was able to bring there a lot of semioticians
from Europe. Newspapers and media from Mexico City came and wrote extens-
ively about the event.
In fact, I do not know why the General Assemblies of this society always ten-
ded to be quite stormy and heavily debated. Often national and political interests
were blended together with the scientific ones. But perhaps this was not so dan-
gerous, since it showed the great interest people had in semiotics. They were pas-
sionately involved in the issue (at least during the congresses).
Roland Posner was able to arrange the IASS congress next in Dresden, so it
was back again in central Europe. In Dresden, the vote was for France and the
University of Lyon, where Professors Louis Panier and Bernard Lamizet invited
the congress to be held. The attendance during the 1990s was about 500–700
in each congress. All the time Semiotica appeared regularly thanks to Sebeok
and his wife Jean Umiker-Sebeok and Mouton de Gruyter in Berlin. In the Posner
time, vice-presidents were John Deely, Gérard Deledalle, Adrian Gimate-Welsh,
Alexandros-Phaidon Lagopoulos and Eero Tarasti; secretary general was Jeff
Bernard and Gloria Withalm as his assistant, the treasurer Magdolna Orosz and
assistant treasurer Richard Lanigan.
But at the Lyon congress in 2004 Posner’s two-year period expired and a new
President was elected and also the Board. Under these conditions a new direction
of the IASS was established. I became the President and the Vice-Presidents were
as follows: Adrian Gimate-Welsh, Richard Lanigan, Youzheng Li and Jean-Claude
Mbarga. The Secretary general became José M. Paz Gago and vice secretary Göran
Sonesson, treasurer Susan Petrilli and vice treasurer John Deely. Semiotica editor-
ship was moved to Toronto under Marcel Danesi. Now the Board was chosen and
elected perhaps more in line with the geographical expansion of semiotics.
Yet it is interesting to notice that no one seems to know until this day how
many members there were in the IASS. Very few had paid any longer the mem-
bership fees, thinking of the advantages it would bring. However, there were un-
official lists, also provided by the ISI, of some 2000 addresses, which was used
for messages and information. With the advent of the internet even this became
unnecessary, with Göran Sonesson keeping the webpage and after the La Coruña
congress in 2009, Priscila Borges in São Paulo.
When I took on the direction of IASS in Lyon, I finally had the courage to pro-
pose that Helsinki and Imatra could organize the next world congress in Finland.
This happened in 2007. The themes of these world congresses had been always
very general, so that everyone could attend. Semiotics itself had exploded in so
many directions and dimensions that no one could master or control its growth
everywhere. There had been such titles as Man and his Signs. To my mind the
titles had to be very common but also reflect in each case the host country and
its traditions and orientations. In Finland we had just had a semiotic research
23.7 The World Congress in Finland | 433
project funded by the Finnish Academy on Understanding and Misunderstanding.

Behind that was the lecture once given in 1983 Jyväskylä by the American linguist
Walburga v. Raffler-Engel who had studied cross-cultural misunderstandings. As
our congress patron we invited President Martti Ahtisaari; he wrote an epigram on
our program booklet: “Semiotics studies all forms of communication. By analyz-
ing cross-cultural misunderstandings it promotes the self-understanding of man-
kind”. These words well-suited Ahtisaari, the Nobel Peace Prize winner a year
later.
23.7 The World Congress in Finland
Now we were able to apply in Finland all that we had learned from organizing
semiotic congresses for over twenty years already, but on a much larger scale. So
what is needed for a world congress? First, you have to fix the theme and then
the plenary speakers. Following the model once provided by the Vienna congress
there was a series of lectures about Finnish culture. So we had Professor and
Rector of Helsinki University, Ilkka Niiniluoto, to tell about philosophy in Fin-
land; Vilmos Voigt introduced Finno-Ugric semiotics, Jaan Kaplinski from Esto-
nia his views on communication and Pirjo Kukkonen on Finnish tango. The next
problem was funding. The idea of a self-funding congress was impossible. So ex-
ternal funding was needed. It was given by sponsors such as the Academy of Fin-
land, City of Imatra, European Social Funds, Finnish Cultural Foundation, Niilo
Helander Foundation, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Ministry of Education, Ministry
of Foreign affairs, Nokia and State Provincial Office of Southern Finland. The Min-
istry of Foreign affairs provided remarkable funding to invite scholars from devel-
oping countries and particularly women (they helped us again for our summer
congress in 2011). I mentioned the list above as an example for anyone organiz-
ing these kinds of conventions. Then we had to decide the congress site, and we
agreed to do the event in two cities, first in Helsinki and then in Imatra. For the
transportation to Imatra we hired one whole train. The railway station in Helsinki
was one morning filled by a huge crowd, all semioticians going to the Imatra
congress. One wagon was for a meeting of the Board of the IASS, which could
work even during travel. Normally also, the world congress of semiotics has been
invited to a buffet reception by the city. This happened in Helsinki as well. Yet the
opening ceremony took place in the historic Solemnity Hall of the University of
Helsinki with the symphony orchestra of the University which played Finlandia
by Sibelius.
Also eating is important as a part of the congress, since at lunch and dinner
tables people meet each other unofficially and can talk about issues. In my mem-
ory of world congresses Lyon stands out as a landmark with its super delicious
dinner tables. However, as to the behavior of semioticians at the buffet one would
recommend a reading of Lévi-Strauss’s L’origine des manières de table. In Finland,
Imatra offered its famous Carelian hospitality. Moreover, in order to do a world
congress a big and motivated staff is needed. We had a committee of 17 persons in-
cluding from the teachers’ side Pirjo Kukkonen, Dario Martinelli, Pekka Pesonen,
Harri Veivo, Merja Bauters, Susanna Välimäki; others were students. The Helsinki
congress was planned to be a ‘dancing congress’ with a ball at the Old Student
House, but in fact rather few attended. Semioticians seem to like less formal to-
getherness.
After the congress there still follows the editing of the proceedings. For years
the proceedings of IASS congresses had not appeared as printed books. Thanks
to the ISI we had a mechanism to produce such a thing, by two years’ hard work
by its editors Paul Forsell and Rick Littlefield. The proceedings appeared in 2009
before the La Coruña congress, in three volumes. They did not contain plenary
speeches since the speakers did not send their texts, probably thinking that they
would never appear as books.
I have thought that IASS has two major challenges in international semiotics:
1) to organize world congresses, 2) to keep publishing Semiotica. These two tasks
have been fulfilled so far. Semiotica is the pride of its publisher Mouton, under the
direction of Anke Beck and Marcia Schwartz. Danesi has as his assistants Andrea
Rocci and Paolo Ammirante.
In the Imatra General Assembly, in which also the membership criteria for
different continents were discussed, the IASS received the invitation from its sec-
retary general José María Paz Gago to convene in his home town La Coruña in
Spain. Again a pre-meeting of the Board was organized and the place was con-
firmed to be a most suitable one. The theme of La Coruña was Communication
of Culture/Culture of Communication. So the communication aspect of semiotics
was emphasized. The meeting was planned to be held at the handsome congress
palace in the harbor, but an economic crisis intervened and so it was held at
the University Campus, which fortunately proved to be quite practical, with its
several buildings side by side. Upon the initiative of Paz Gago the main outside
plenary speaker was the writer Salman Rushdie. He spoke about the meaning of
history, and tuned his whole speech in a humanistic manner so that it became a
most appropriate message to all of the hundreds of semioticians gathered in the
audience. The general assembly, when voting for the new Board, was again fairly
stormy with several issues raised about the statutes, and about who was entitled
to continue on the Board and who not. Also the Executive Committee brought their
national problems on stage to be decided, which was of course not the task of the
IASS assembly. Yet things were unresolved after the time of the first long meeting
23.8 From Italy to Bulgaria and Estonia | 435
had expired, and it had to convene again two days later. The new Board consisted
of the same as earlier except for new Vice-Presidents, who were Paul Cobley, José
Enrique Finol and Anne Hénault. So for the first time also the Paris school was
included in the Board of the IASS. It was also decided that next congress would
take place at Nanjing Normal University.
The future Chinese hosts immediately invited the Board for a planning meet-
ing to see the place. This was the first time many experienced China, its tremend-
ous economic growth and also its growing and flourishing semiotic tradition. The
soil had been prepared by, among others, the long-time work by You Zheng Li to
introduce the classics of semiotics to China. After Nanjing the preparations for
the next world congress to be held at Sofia by New Bulgarian University under
Kristian Bankov, vice-rector of the University, had already been launched. The
world congress in Sofia proved to be a great success, indeed. Paul Cobley was
elected a new President and Kristian Bankov the Secretary General.
23.8 From Italy to Bulgaria and Estonia
However, the events at the IASS are only the cover or umbrella for a most manifold
development in our discipline on various continents. Here I deal with it only from
the organizational point of view and insofar as I have been involved. In many
European countries, semiotic master and doctoral programs have emerged, not
only in Italy, which has always been the promised land of semiotics. As Umberto
Eco said, Italy has a lot of semiotics since it is the same as communication. He
had established at Bologna University the all-Italian doctoral program of semiot-
ics, whose courses partly took place also in San Marino under Patrizia Violi and
Patrick Coppock. In southern Italy Augusto Ponzio organized a lot of symposia
together with Susan Petrilli and Patrizia Calefato. Studies for the doctorate were
very well organized there. In Turin, Ugo Volli and Guido Ferrari were teaching
semiotics, Omar Calabrese in Siena, Isabella Pezzini in La Sapienza, Rome, Prof.
Abruzzese in Milano, and Gianfranco Marrone in Palermo. I was able to visit al-
most all of these places and meet their gifted students and learned teachers.
In Bulgaria semiotics had been started in the early 1990s at the new Bulgarian
University, a private academy, by Maria Popova and supported by the President of
its Board, former Ambassador Bogdan Bogdanov. Sebeok visited it and so did John
Deely and myself. Its most important tradition became the Early Fall Schools of Se-
miotics, earlier mostly and nowadays always held in Sozopol at the Black Sea. By
cooperation with Italian and Greek semioticians it has grown a major educational
project of young semioticians, visited by students even from Northern countries
like Estonia and Finland. Its director Kristian Bankov is in fact a philosopher who
received his PhD at Helsinki University, but now he is interested in consumerism

and applied semiotics. Such topics as advertising, media, marketing, sports fan
clubs, etc. are indeed favored by young Italian, Greek and Bulgarian students.
Strong support has been given by Turin University and its Professors Ugo Volli and
Massimo Leone, the latter running also a new net magazine of semiotics, Lexia.
In the meantime, in Estonia the teaching of semiotics was finally started by
Peeter Torop and Kalevi Kull. Tartu University encouraged the memory of Yuri
Lotman as the greatest Estonian scientist with a modernist statue in front of the
Library in Tartu. The semiotic center of Tartu got the position of Center of Excel-
lence and substantial funding. This happened all rather recently in the late 2000s
and early 2010s. The Estonian case shows how important for organizing semiotics
it is to have 1) support from the highest direction of the University, 2) a substantial
national academic basis and tradition. In the latter sense Estonia could stand on
the names of Lotman and Uexküll.
The latter was remarkably helped by the late Thomas Sebeok, who considered
biology as the key science of semiotics and the future. The son of Jakob v. Uexüll,
Thure had continued biosemiotics, which joined with the work of Danish scholars
became one of the new paradigms of semiotics altogether. Earlier they used to
have their meetings also in Imatra, hosted by the ISI.
23.9 The Finnish Network University of Semiotics

as an experiment
In Finland a new phase of semiotics was opened when finally, at the third request,
the European Union accepted to fund the National Network University of Finland
under the guidance of the ISI. The funding was channelled via the Southern Care-
lian Board, and it was part of the so-called structural funding for unfavorable
regions. This started in 2004 and meant rich years for the ISI for many years.
13 national universities joined the project whose aim was to educate PhDs of se-
miotics in each university in their already existing discipline, but the education
and supervision taking place essentially at Imatra. The program included also
studies on the Master level of semiotics. The Network University included also
such peculiarities as the School of Defense, which under Prof. Aki-Mauri Huhtinen
adopted semiotics in the training of officers. One doctoral thesis appeared on the
notion of strategy. I had not heard that semiotics was used elsewhere in an army –
except in Nanjing, where I met a teacher from its International University, which
then proved to be a military academy and the teacher a general.
23.9 The Finnish Network University of Semiotics as an experiment | 437
Anyway, with this money from the EU it was possible to arrange a lot of teach-
ing of semiotics in Imatra and also start a temporary chair of semiotics. Its first
holder was Harri Veivo in 2004–2007 from literary studies at the University of
Helsinki. The chair was situated at Helsinki University whose own semiotic study
program thus gained a remarkable contribution. After this period the chair was
moved to the University’s own budget as its temporary professor, whose holder
is a Peirce scholar Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen. Besides Veivo, the Network University
had two associate professors of semiotics, Dario Martinelli and Guido Ipsen.
Still, in spite of this formal structure everything remained on a temporary
basis and could change any time the situation would change. In fact, this has
happened with the new University Law in Finland that privatized all earlier State
Universities. It is still under discussion what impact it had on the science of a
country that had thus far a flourishing academic life covering the whole country.
Privatization again is a part of the huge epistemic change whose testimonies we all
are and which means a total commercialization of all aspects of life. The Chinese
Vice-President of the IASS You Zheng Li wrote the following recently:
In our congress we will be engaged in many important topical discussions about the future
of IASS and semiotics in general. Among many key issues one of the most significant is
related to the general humanistic-academic situation in the world today. We are living in a
completely commercialized world where the professional benefits become the top principle
even in academia. In my opinion this could be the most serious problem: whereas in former
times humanist scholars searched for truth, today they search for professional (individual
and collective) profits. If so, any results in our practice could be used to continue our “pro-
fession”. The consequence must be that our scientific pursuits will be disconnected from
the classical ideal for scientific truth. If scholars become businessman-like activists they
could also adopt various means that are taken as proper within the commercial world. If we
semioticians also follow such laws to search for our professional profits, what will happen
to our semiotic future?
Most intelligent people in the world agree that something went wrong. Is it ac-
ceptable that all national, regional structures, traditions, jobs, cultures vanish
during this enormous global process? It started when someone began to count
everything. Such things, which were not earlier counted at all but taken as gran-
ted, were now being calculated, they got a price-tag. For instance, take facilities
of the universities. Suddenly they were no longer property of the university but
of the state. Then the university had to pay rent. But rent came from the state
budget. The situation was crazy, with money moving from one pocket to the other.
The normal teaching work became completely disturbed by constant evaluations,
applications, competitions, all kinds of administrative operations for which the
university needed to hire more and more specialists. Less and less money was left
for the basic functions of the whole academic system. This is the experience in
Finland, and probably in the European Union it is the same.
23.10 SEMKNOW
Yet, a new agent appeared in Finland in the field of semiotics when Lapland Uni-
versity in Rovaniemi entered the scene. This was thanks to its energetic young
Rector Mauri Ylä-Kotola, who had had a philosophical education at Helsinki Uni-
versity, and now as a new Rector in Rovaniemi wanted to have there a lot of inter-
national activities. Imatra ISI, which had remained an independent private insti-
tute legally on the association basis had for years been looking for an affiliation
with some university. This had been recommended earlier by Mrs. Uosukainen
under her ministerial time in the 1990s. What made Rovanemi particularly inter-
esting, was that despite its geographical place at a distance from even Helsinki, it
had founded an agency called Finnbarents whose only task was to prepare EU
applications. They had been successful, since 95 % of their projects had been
accepted by Brussels. They had a Belgian agent, Miss Elke Kleutghen, who was
from Brussels, and knew exactly what to do.
So a new application for semiotics was made for a doctoral program in Europe
under direction of Lapland and having three other partners: the New Bulgarian
University and the universities in Sofia, Turin in Italy, and Tartu in Estonia. The
first try to win the support failed around 2007, the time of our world congress.
But a try was made again, and now with success. So started a project whose ac-
ronym became SEMKNOW. Its managers changed quickly. Now, when the three
years’ planning is going to end and programs are opening in 2013 in every partner
university, it’s managed by Irina Geraschenko.
The project mission is defined as follows: “The aims of our doctoral program
is to provide and develop high level semiotic expertise applicable to social and
economic spheres thus being competitive on the labor market”. So the project
is the answer to the challenge of new generations of semioticians having been
educated until the MA level all over Europe, but without any special views toward
a future job. Doctors of semiotics from many countries were writing to me and
asking for work in Finland for instance, and even some with brilliant papers from
the highest European universities. And the careers of many others, already doc-
tors, had stagnated, and many had been forced to return to college or school as a
teacher. So something had to be done quickly so that a whole generation of young
semioticians would not feel lost and abandoned. In order to include efficiently
the labor market orientation in the doctoral program, it was decided to make so-
called company agreements with various enterprises and institutes, so that they
23.11 What do we want? | 439
were ready to receive SEMKNOW doctoral students for a fieldwork period. The
agreement had no commitment from companies to really recruit these candidates,
but one never knew what could happen. This was definitely on the agenda of the
European Union, which had started to think of education only as preparation for
a job.
In any case, it was a pragmatic answer of semioticians to the challenges of our
time. We have to be realistic, even if one were opposed to the total commercializ-
ation of life and culture, and even if one were supporting progressive phenomena
such as “occupy” movements, ecology, indignant students, etc. The strong point
in semiotics has been, through all times, its amazing capacity to adapt to different
Umwelt conditions and changes of paradigms. This is why semiotics is still as fresh
as ever – and not dead as Julia Kristeva was saying as early as in 1974.
Another idea of SEMKNOW was that it would not focus on any particular
school of semiotics but that the whole tradition of semiotics should be open to
students. Now, the planning phase with a lot of meetings is almost over, and now
starts what is called the implementation of the program. For this further funding
is requested from Brussels. However, as everyone who has tried knows, this is
possible only through professionally trained agents who master the very special
EU jargon and bureaucracy. Accordingly, this very important pilot project, whose
pioneer was in fact the Finnish Network University of Semiotics in 2004 – in which
doctoral studies were experimented with on the national level – is now expanding
its ideas into the international and pan-European scene. The idea is that, later,
any European university fulfilling the criteria of SEMKNOW could join it. It has
also been discussed under which terms double doctorates might be possible or
at least co-tutored ones. And all this was initiated from the peripheral area of
Lapland, which I myself had never even visited before this project started. But
I comforted myself by the fact that I knew also a lot of Brazilians living in Rio or
São Paulo who had never been in the Amazons. However, Lapland University is
a completely modern university and a model example of how in a vastly smaller
context such a utopian issue as semiotics can become a reality.
23.11 What do we want?
Altogether, it seems to me that organizing semiotics, globally and nationally, is

an endless task. In spite of all, however, I do not believe it to be a Sisyphean
task. “Semiotics continues to astonish” as one fresh book has been entitled. How
semiotics will survive in the present economic crisis all over the world is hard
to anticipate. When university budgets are cut it depends on many things con-
cerning on which list semiotics is put. If it is seen as what is fashionably called
an ‘innovative’ science, it may have a chance. If not, it can still survive as an

underground and marginal movement. It may remain as something that seems
to be utopian, improbabilité infinie as Hannah Arendt said, as something which
one day suddenly becomes a reality. In the present Internet revolution and with
the Facebook age, semiotics has not lost one bit of its actuality. Someone just
asked in the media, Why do we still need universities when what the professors
say in their lectures can be much more easily discovered on the internet? This is
obviously a crazy idea, since every society will need a place where young persons
not yet mature, not yet knowing who they are and what they want, are kept. When
the Japanese semiotician Masao Yamaguchi retired, he established in the remote
countryside of his country a Buddhist meditation center and a semiotic university
of his own.
Might we think of the possibility of a semiotic university, which would teach
people the principles of how to deal with the inundation of information, how to
choose, select, and distinguish the essential from the unessential? Solomon Mar-
cus recently argued that the majority of people live in a cultural slavery, but they
do not know it. Should semioticians reveal it? This is a semio-ethical question.
It is young persons’ right to be ignorant, their right is to be in the category of
Ernst Bloch’s noch nicht, not yet, as he says in his Prinzip Hoffnung. Perhaps we
semioticians also belong in the ‘not-yet class’, as perpetual students of our signs.
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Index
Aalto, Alvar 308, 309 Bach, J. S. 74, 84, 90, 92–94, 284, 374
Aarne, Antti 368, 385, 386, 388 Bacon, Henry 246, 247, 441
Aattela, Kalervo 428 Bądarzewska, Tekla 96
Abbot, Francis Ellingwood 324 Bagh, Peter von 40, 441
Abruzzese, Alberto 435 Baker, Evan 193, 444
Ablali, Driss 77, 441 Bakhtin, Mikhail 30, 35, 72, 111, 144, 148,
Abu Ubaid 101 184, 200, 206, 223, 226, 281, 349, 367,
Ackte, Aino 310 368, 374, 388–391, 395, 406, 411, 441
Adler, Guido 87 Bankov, Kristian 105, 156, 157, 342, 435, 441
Adorno, Theodor W. 7, 8, 28, 33, 39, 40, 42, Barker, Chris 187–192, 194, 441
48, 74–76, 88, 89, 91, 95, 100, 103, 144, Barrie, David 450
158, 283, 294, 297, 372, 411, 441 Barthes, Roland 16, 63, 80, 84, 140, 144, 145,
Afanasyev 385, 386 187, 189, 191, 197, 216, 245–247, 249,
Afnan, Soheil Muhsin 102, 441 254, 255, 265, 277, 352, 367, 380,
Aho, Kalevi 161 398–406, 424, 425, 442
Bartók, Béla 94
Ahonen, Pertti 441
Baryshnikov, Mikhail 230
Ahtisaari, Martti 433
Bastide, Françoise 270, 442
Airola, Veikko 441
Baudrillard, Jean 45, 133, 139, 171
Albeniz, Isaac 134, 220
Bauters, Merja 434
al-Ghazali 441
Beauvoir, Simone de 4, 343, 395
Allen, Woody 219
Beck, Anke 434
Almeida, Renato 368, 441
Beethoven, Ludwig van 8, 10, 58, 82, 84, 86,
Althusser 146, 150
90, 91, 93, 94, 96, 138, 168, 195, 216,
Altman, Rick 81, 441
218, 219, 223, 243, 283, 284, 286, 287,
Ammirante, Paolo 434
290, 294, 296, 342, 361, 376, 382, 405,
Anderson, Benedict 182, 206 444
Andreyev, N. P. 385, 386 Bellini, Vincenzo 84, 94
Andrieu, Bernard 441 Bely, Andrei 362, 366, 371, 449
Apo, Satu 441 Benedict, Ruth 187, 189, 442
Arendt, Hannah 3, 4, 21, 22, 31, 36, 103, 106, Benjamin, Walter 39
183, 343, 440 Berger, Peter L. 140
Aristotle 100, 101, 221, 322 Bergman, Erik 88
Arlt, Wulf 443 Bergman, Ingmar 46, 373
Aron, Raymond 177, 178, 441 Bergson, Henri 31, 105, 163, 167–170, 172,
Artaud, Antonin 214 174, 176, 337, 342, 401, 409, 441, 442
Arwidsson, A. I. 317 Berio, Luciano 84
Asafiev, Boris 74, 82, 84, 167, 226, 286, 289, Berlioz, Hector 87, 443
300, 369, 374, 387, 441 Bernanos, Georges 79, 116, 407
Aspelin, Kurt 368, 441 Bernard, Claude 270
Augustine of Hippo (St. Augustin) 102 Bernard, Jeff 431, 432
Austin, John L. 176 Bernard, Sarah 213
Avicenna (Ibn-Sina) 101, 102, 441 Berndtson, Gunnar 261
456 | Index
Bernini, Gian Lorenzo 84 Buttitta, Antonino 427

Bernstein, Leonard 295 Bystrina, I. 446
Berruti, Massimo 3
Birdwhistle, Harrison 218 Caesar, Gaius Julius 226
Bloch, Ernst 31, 40, 101, 107, 232, 440, Cage, John 58, 98, 127, 415
442, 448 Calabrese, Omar 435
Block de Behar, Lisa 430 Calefato, Patrizia 435
Blok, Alexander 362, 366 Calvino, Italo 445
Blume, Friedrich 97 Camus, Albert 43
Boëtsch, Gilles 441 Capus, Alfred 252
Bogdanov, Bogdan 435 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da 84
Bordron, Jean-François 77 Carême, Antoine 253, 263
Borges, Priscila 432 Carnap, Rudolf 169, 170, 172, 176
Borrel, Anne 448 Carpelan, Axel 117
Borromini, Francesco 84 Carreño, Teresa 96
Boss, Medard 65, 194, 199, 442 Cassirer, Ernst 140
Botz-Bornstein, Thorsten 380, 382, 383, Castellana, Marcello 429
392, 395, 397, 442 Castillo, José Romero 430
Bouissac, Paul 16, 219, 429, 430, 442 Castrén, Matias Aleksanteri 314
Boulanger 254 Catherine the Great 428
Boulez, Pierre 91 Cauquelin, Anne 100, 101, 442
Bourdieu, Pierre 29, 32, 86, 139, 199 Celibidache, Sergiu 243
Bouzher, Myriam 443 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand 43
Brahms, Johannes 375, 376, 450 Chapman, John Jay 323, 324, 442
Brask, Peter 429 Charles, Daniel 127, 429
Braudel, Fernand 178–180, 442 Chausson, Ernest 45
Bréal, Michel 5, 342 Checca 216, 217
Brecht, Bertolt 150, 372 Chekhov, Anton 108, 361
Brémond, Claude 34, 84, 289, 387, 442 Chertkov, Vladimir 107, 452
Brent, Joseph 324, 442 Cherubini, Luigi 342
Bresson, Robert 233, 407 Chesterman, Andrew 183, 199
Brhaspati 416 Chistov, K. V. 386
Brillat-Samarin, J. A. 68, 249, 251–253, 442 Chomsky 62, 203, 325
Britten, Benjamin 230 Chopin, Fryderyk 94, 98, 167, 219, 220, 388,
Broms, Henri 108 354, 392, 425, 428, 404, 405
430, 442 Cioran, Samuel D. 354, 355, 363, 364
Brontë, Charlotte 43 Cobley, Paul 33, 80, 81, 342, 435, 442
Brown, Ralph W. 339 Cocteau, Jean 43, 183
Bruckner, Anton 95, 301 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 321
Brutus 226 Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle 343
Buber, Martin 208, 448 Collins, Frank 444
Buchler, Julius 449 Comte, Auguste 271, 272, 346, 347, 354, 443
Buffa, Aira 443 Condé, Gérard 87, 443
Bulgakov, Mikhail 372 Coppock, Patrick 435
Burbank, John 448 Corrêa de Azevedo, Luiz Heitor 429
Burckhardt, Jakob 154, 442 Couperin, François 84, 224
Busoni, Ferruccio 117, 225 Courtés, Joseph 77, 84, 270, 409, 443
Index | 457
Csinidis, Jean-Laurent 3 326, 351, 368, 372, 401, 403, 406, 424,
Cuaron, Garza 426, 430 426, 427, 435, 443
Czernov, Igor 314, 428, 430, 443 Edelfelt, Albert 263
Czerny, Carl 96 Eggebrecht, Hans Heinrich 92
Eichenbaum, Boris 368
Dagar 416 Einstein, Albert 342
Dahlhaus, Carl 86, 87, 89, 95, 97, 98, 286, Einstein, Alfred 342, 443
291, 443 Eira, Maaria 241
Danesi, Marcel 247, 430, 432, 434 Eisenstein, Sergei 369
Danilevsky, Nikolai 354 Ekström, Pelle 261
Dante Alighieri 123 Elgar, Edward 122
Danuser, Hermann 93, 94, 443 El Greco 8, 41, 168
Darrault-Harris, Ivan 30, 443 Elias, Norbert 36, 46, 86, 153, 154, 165, 166,
Deaville, James 444 178, 309, 443
Debussy, Claude 117, 242, 297, 402, 445 Emerson, Caryl 441
Deely, John 52, 58, 59, 103, 105, 277, 326, Emerson, Ralph Waldo 3, 6, 105, 321, 441
348, 382, 406, 426, 432, 435, 443 Eng, Jan van der 453
Delalande, François 427, 429 Eronen, Ella 239, 240
Deledalle, Gérard 321, 432, 443 Eschbach, Achim 443
Deleuze, Gilles 184, 185, 203–205, 443 Espagne, Michel 206, 207, 444
Delyi, Henri 452 Espinosa Vera, Pablo 431
Derrida, Jacques 54, 56, 189, 276 Euclid 101
Descartes, René 102 Even-Zohar, Itamar 428
Dewey, John 30, 443 Excousseau, J.-L. 270, 444
Diaghilev, Serge 92
Disney, Walt 149 Fabbri, Franco 99, 444
Donizetti, Gaetano 342 Farzaneh, M. F. 108
Donskoi, Marc 130 Fehr, Drude von der 429
Dosse, François 387, 443 Ferrari, Guido 435
Dostoevsky, Fyodor 111, 134, 144, 177, 374, Février, Jacques 214
389 Ficarelli, Mario 416
Ducard, Dominique 441 Finol, Enrique 155–157, 444
Ducrot, Oswald 71, 443 Finscher, Ludwig 93
Dumézil, Georges 75, 195 Fisch, Max H. 105, 106, 321, 322, 344, 444
Duncan, Isadora 214 Fischer-Dieskau, Dietrich 404
Dundes, Alain 387, 388 Fiske, John 324
Duras, Marguerite 446 Flagstadt, Kirsten 239
Durin, Jean 452 Flaubert, Gustave 114
Durkheim, Émile 139 Floch, J. M. 81
Dutz, Klaus D. 451 Fludernik, Monika 72
Dvořák, Antonín 94 Fontanille, Jacques 23, 24, 185, 270, 374,
404, 411, 444
Eagleton, Terry 145, 146, 148, 443 Fontayn, Margot 230
Eco 3, 17, 39, 45, 56, 59, 63, 64, 70, 80, 89, Forman, Milos 44
101, 109, 111, 140, 156, 163–166, 176, Forsell, Paul 434
179, 180, 184, 190, 194, 249, 294, 306, Forsgren, Kjell-Åke 451
458 | Index
Foucault, Michel 58, 64–66, 76, 109, 116, Greimas, A. J. 4, 5, 7, 10, 11, 16, 31, 39, 42–44,
133, 134, 144, 151, 182, 184, 189, 193, 52, 54, 66, 71, 76, 77, 81, 84, 109, 113,
194, 312, 336, 425, 444 115, 116, 120, 121, 126–128, 137, 140,
Fourier, Charles 423 144, 147, 150, 162, 164, 179, 196, 202,
France, Anatole 252, 213, 216, 230, 233, 249, 251, 252, 254,
Franta, Vladimir 162 256, 257, 260, 265, 270, 271, 281, 291,
Freud, Sigmund 269, 395, 426 292, 295, 302, 308, 315, 321, 325–327,
Fricke, George R. 444 329, 343, 348, 349, 351, 358, 359, 374,
Fricke, Richard 220, 444 378–380, 382, 385, 387, 392–396, 398,
Froelich, Carl 236 401, 403, 407–409, 423–425, 427, 429,
Frye, Northrop 73, 124, 359, 444 444, 445
Fuják, Július 3, 444 Grimm, Jacob 73, 445
Furtwängler, Wilhelm 239, 292, 292, 444 Grinbaum, Blanche 452
Grossman, Leonid 374
Grundfest Schoepf, Brooke 447
Gallen-Kallela, Akseli 117, 308–310
Grygar, Mijmir 453
Galman, John 427
Guattari, Félix 203, 443
Gandhi, Mahatma 161
Guerra Lisi, Stefania 32, 84, 215, 221, 223,
Gans, Eduard 445
230, 445
Garbo, Greta 232, 245, 246
Guerri, Claudio 430
Gardin, Jean-Claude 430
Guittard, Jacqueline 441
Gasparov, Boris 370, 428
Gayrard, Julien 443
Habermas, Jürgen 33, 445
Geigges, Werner 453
Hahn, Reynaldo 46
Gentil, Jules 222 Habsburg dynasty 195
Geraschenko, Irina 438 Hall, Stuart 184
Gergiev, Valery 243, 376 Halm, August 292
Géricault 159, 160, 448 Hämeen-Anttila, Jaakko 101, 243, 441, 445
Gide, André 43 Handel, G. Fr. 90, 93, 161
Giere, Ronald 61 Hanslick, Eduard 370
Gimate-Welsh, Adrian 432 Hardwick, Charles S. 342, 344, 348, 353, 445
Gingold, Joseph 310 Härmä, Juhani 425
Ginzburg, Carlo 180 Harnoncourt, Nikolaus 89
Glinka, Mikhail 355, 374 Hartmann 354
Gluck, Chr. W. 87, 88, 93, 94 Hatten, Robert 287, 445, 446
Goethe, J. W. von 17, 27, 79, 106, 120, 128, Haydn, Joseph 86, 87, 93, 178
134, 142, 192, 199, 274, 276, 282, 284, Heath, Stephen 441
374, 375, 424 Hegel, G. W. Fr. 3, 4, 21–24, 74, 103–106,
Gogol, Nikolai 108, 255, 368, 444 152–154, 157, 162, 167, 171–173, 175,
Goldmann, Lucien 114, 115, 137, 144, 444 179–181, 188, 196, 199, 200, 273, 274,
Goldoni, Caro 216 307, 308, 321–323, 325–330, 332, 337,
Goodman, Nelson 58, 444 338, 344–347, 354, 355, 357, 395, 409,
Gorlée, Dinda L. 429, 430 411, 445
Gould, Glenn 92, 234 Hedayat, Sadeq 108
Grabócz, Márta 429 Heidegger, Martin 3–5, 16, 21, 63, 100, 106,
Gray, Cecil 296 125, 126, 128, 140, 164, 166, 170, 321,
Gregorius Thaumaturgus 354 326, 336, 395, 445
Index | 459
Heininen, Paavo 311 Isidoro 216, 217

Helbo, André 215, 445 Ivanov, Sergei 355
Hellberg, Elena 429 Ivanov, V. V. 453
Hénault, Anne 45, 435 Ivan the Terrible 307
Henry, Hélène 452 Ives, Charles 304
Hensel, Fanny 96
Hepburn, Audrey 246 Jacobson, Claire 447
Hepokoski, James 301, 302, 445 Jacono, Jean-Marie 3, 446
Heracles 162
Jakobson, Roman 72, 88, 115, 118, 171, 177,
Herder, Johann Gottfried vom 197
249, 368, 369, 372, 380, 386, 387, 446
Hermans, Hubert J. M. 30, 35, 390, 445
Jalas, Jussi 303
Hermes Trismegistos 354
Jalava, Antti 310, 446
Herrmann, Jörg M. 453
James, William 30, 321, 324, 337, 344, 352,
Herzfeld, Michael 442
390
Hesse, Hermann 375
Janáček, Leoš 56, 57, 453
Hiltunen, Elina 447
Jankélévich, Vladimir 95, 135, 221, 370, 393,
Hintikka, Jaakko 61
446
Hitchcock, Alfred 241
Järnefelt, Eero 310
Hjelmslev, Louis 4, 327, 328
Jaspers, Karl 3–5, 21, 38, 51–53, 100, 105,
Hobbes, Thomas 274
106, 116, 121, 126, 141, 142, 176, 321,
Hocking, Richard 450
395, 400, 409, 446
Hocking, W. E. 450
Jiránek, Jaroslav 184, 429
Hoffmann, E. T. A. 108
Johansen, Jørgen Dines 60, 74, 429, 430, 446
Hoffmeyer, Jesper 445
Johnson, Mark 27
Hollo, J. A. 113
Jolles, André 72, 73
Holquist, Michael 441
Josephson, Ernst 261
Honegger, Arthur 400
Hope, Bob 239
Hoppál, Mihály 425, 429 Kafka, Franz 108
Horowitz, Vladimir 221 Kaila, Kai 442
Houser, Nathan 350 Kajanus, Robert 117
Hovenpitzer, Roman 224 Kalima, Eino 227
Huhtinen, Aki-Mauri 155, 436, 445 Kallberg, Jeffrey 98
Humboldt, Wilhelm 106, 197 Kallio, Veikko 307, 452
Hume, David 11, 104, 125, 170, 445 Kandinsky, Wassily 146, 203, 292, 369–371,
Huntington, Samuel 138, 156 376, 453
Husserl, Edmund 21, 33, 50, 57, 58, 105, 121, Kant, Immanuel 3, 4, 7, 16, 21, 22, 24, 32, 39,
163, 170, 176, 279, 394, 397, 445 42, 54, 55, 59, 103, 105, 163, 179, 251,
272, 273, 275, 278, 322, 326, 344, 354,
Ibn Arabi 185, 186 357, 395, 442, 446
Ibri, Ivo 416 Kaplinski, Jaan 433
Ikegami, Yoshihiko 430 Karbusický, Vladimir 83–85, 429, 446
Ingarden, Roman 10, 348 Karnowski, H. 446
Inge Godoy, Rolf 445 Karsavin, Lev 52, 378, 379, 381, 382, 446
Inwood, Michael 22, 272, 274, 446 Karsavina, Tamara 382
Ipsen, Guido 142, 156, 437 Kašponis, Rimtautas 379, 382
Irwin, George J. 441 Kätner 236
460 | Index
Kaurismäki, Aki 40, 47, 235, 236, 261, Laban, Rudolf von 214
441, 446 La Bruyère, Jean de 27, 235
Kent, Leonard J. 444 Lacan, Jacques 21, 336, 395
Khachaturian, Aram 368 Lagopoulos, Alexandros-Phaidon 430, 432
Khayam, Omar 108 Laine, Kimmo 241, 242, 447
Kianto, Ilmari 312 Laine-Almi, Doris 242, 447
Kierkegaard, Søren 3, 4, 22–25, 46, 103, 105, Laine Ketner, Kenneth 444
192, 322, 348, 355, 395, 403 Laitinen, Arto 449
Kilpi, Volter 447 Lakoff, George 222
Kircher, Athanasius 98, 446 Lakshin, Vladimir 108
La Mettrie, Julien Jean Offroy de 183
Kirchschläger, Rudolf 426
Lamizet, Bernard 432
Kivi, Aleksis 158, 308, 309, 446
Landowski, Eric 40, 53, 156, 427, 447
Klaus, Georg 61, 146, 448
Landsch, M. 446
Klein, Jean-Pierre 443
Langbehn, Julius 205
Klein, Melanie 30, 343
Langdalen, Jørgen 429
Kleutghen, Elke 438 Lanigan, Richard 432
Klinkenberg, Jean-Marie 78, 374 Larsen, Svend Erik 429
Kloesel, Christian J. W. 444 Larsson, Carl 261
Knuuttila, Sirkka 446 LaRue, Jan 288, 294, 447
Knuuttila, Tarja 60, 61, 446 Launis, Armas 317
Kochan, Miriam 442 Laurell, Axel Adolf 330
Koch, Walter A. 430 Laurinen, Tuomas 161
Kokkonen, Joonas 308, 309, 311, 446 Leach, Edmund 191, 447
Köngäs-Maranda, Elli-Kaija 109, 387, 388, Leander, Zarah 226
425, 446 Le Clézio 11
Konopnicki, Danielle 452 Le Corbusier 204
Kostka, Stefan 284, 285, 446 Leeuwen, Theo van 447
Kotilainen, Otto 304 Lehto, Otto 44
Koussevitzky, Serge 219, 221 Leibniz 59, 100, 102, 163, 322, 344
Kowzan, Tadeusz 215, 446, 447 Leiman, Mikael 390
Kress, Günther 79, 447 Leino, Eino 240, 312, 313, 447
Lejeune, Philippe 78, 79, 447
Kristeva, Julia 16, 109, 269, 275, 277, 326,
Leman, Marc 445
343, 389, 390, 401, 404, 439, 447
Lenin, V. I. 145
Krohn, Kaarle 368, 375, 385
Leone, Massimo 436, 447
Kukkonen, Pirjo 101, 433, 434, 446, 447
Lepik, Peet 111
Kukkonen, Taneli 441
Lermontov, Mikhail 355
Kull, Kalevi 428, 436
Lesourd, François 446
Kuorikoski, Arto 441 Levas, Santeri 301
Kupfer, Harry 107, 224, 373 Levin, Isidor 386
Kurkela, Vesa 313, 447 Lévinas, Emmanuel 106, 349, 389, 406, 410,
Kuronen, Tuomas 200, 447 447, 448
Kurth, Ernst 84, 90, 284, 292, 300, 395, 447 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 4, 28, 39, 56, 75, 76,
Kuusamo, Altti 226 109, 112, 116, 140, 154, 165, 184, 187, 191,
Kuusi, Osmo 425, 447 194, 200, 205, 206, 231, 249, 252, 254,
Kyhälä-Juntunen, Kerttu 441 265, 269, 283, 326, 368, 370, 384,
Index | 461
386–388, 401, 407, 424, 425, 434, Manet, Édouard 257

447, 448 Mann, Thomas 117
Lewin, Kurt 34, 35 Mannerheim, C. G. E. 35
Li, You-Zheng 430, 435, 437 Mannoury, Gerrit 443, 448
Lichtenhan, Ernst 443 Mao Zedong 225
Lidov, David 285, 287, 297, 447 Maranda, Pierre 109, 446
Lifar, Serge 242 Marc-Lipiansky, Mireille 39, 448
Ligeti, György 84, 88, 289, 297 Marcel, Gabriel 4, 21
Lindberg, Magnus 161 Marcus, Solomon 55, 440
Lintunen, Pertti 429 Marrone, Gianfranco 80–82, 435, 448
Lippmann, Léontine 354 Martin, Serge 427
List, George 453 Martinelli, Dario 430, 434, 437, 448
Liszt, Ferenc 286, 444 Martinet, André 81, 190, 204
Littlefield, Richard 434, 446 Martinez, José Luiz 413–419, 448
Locke, John 57, 125, 276 Martucci, Giuseppe 92
Lõhmus, Aivo 428 Marx, Karl 103
Lõhmus, Maarja 149, 447 Marx, Wolfgang 97
Lönnrot, Elias 309 Massumi, Brian 443
Lorenz, Max 237–239 Matson, Alex 446
Lossky, Vladimir 383 Maupassant, Guy de 402
Lotman, Yuri 4, 41, 62, 64, 68, 72, 76, 81, 111, Maurois, André 108
116, 117, 120, 124, 126, 138, 140, 156, Mauss, Marcel 200, 222, 232, 409
179, 215, 249, 254, 271, 281, 306, 307, Mayakovsky, Vladimir 368
309, 314, 326, 346, 368, 401, 428, 429, Maximus the Confessor 354
436, 443, 453 Mbarga, Jean-Claude 201, 432, 448
Lotze, Hermann 321 McDermott, John J. 322, 323, 450
Lovejoy, Arthur 202, 283, 294, 447 Mead, George Herbert 30, 308, 334, 448
Luckmann, Thomas 41, 46, 50, 53, 71, 140, Medici, Maria di 130, 145
208, 353, 410, 451 Mendelssohn, Felix 283, 295, 297
Ludwig II of Bavaria 179, 236, 237, 246, 247, Mérigaud, Bernard 446
441 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 4, 321
Lukkarila, Matti 447 Mersmann, Hans 85
Lundberg, Bengt A. 368, 441 Meyer, Friedrich Gottlob 313
Luyken, Lorenz 287, 288, 294, 447 Meyer, Leonard B. 86, 178, 287, 313, 448
Meyerhold, Vsevolod 214
Macassar, Gilles 446 Michel, Régis 448
MacCannell, Dean 430 Miereanu, Costin 429
Mâche, François-Bernard 447 Mignot, Yvan 452
Macie, John 11, 12 Mill, J. S. 361
Magnani, Anna 239 Miller 386
Mahler, Gustav 95, 117, 219, 283, 294, 301, Minkus, Léon 242
401, 450 Mirka, Danuta 289, 448
Majava, Heikki 391 Mitford, Nancy 138, 197, 349
Mäkinen, Timo 444 Moeschler, Jacques 430
Malecka, Teresa 447 Moilanen, Tauno 431
Malevich, Kazimir 369 Molière 110
Malinowski, Bronisław 408 Monelle, Raymond 88
462 | Index
Monroe, Marilyn 233 Osolsobě, Ivo 225, 373

Monteiro, Ricardo 413 O’Toole, Michael 430
Montesquieu 27, 129
Monteverdi, Claudio 94 Pacius, Friedrich 96, 264, 311, 312
Morozoff, Ivan 252 Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da 84, 93, 284
Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Guido 370 Palo, Tauno 241
Morris, Charles 33, 75–77, 81, 136, 138, 140, Panier, Louis 432
308, 394, 405, 412, 448 Panula, Jorma 221
Morris, G. S. D. 321 Parland, Henry 380, 392, 393
Moser, K. 441 Parland, Oscar 31, 192, 380, 382, 392, 393,
Motiekaitis, Ramunas 448 395, 449
Mozart, W. A. 51, 58, 86, 87, 93, 94, 96, 178, Parpola, Asko 415
224, 225, 250, 287, 297, 342, 376 Parpola, Simo 415
Muhamedov, Irek 230, 241, 242 Pascal, Blaise 115, 137
Mukařovský, Jan 78, 368, 448 Pasolini, Pierpaolo 399, 400
Mukerhjee 416 Paul, Adolf 117
Münster, Arno 184, 208, 448 Pawlowska, Malgorzata 447
Munthe, Axel 261 Paz Gago, José María 432, 434
Murail, Tristan 161 Peirce, C. S. 4, 6, 11, 22, 25, 55, 56, 58–60,
Murtomäki, Veijo 292, 293, 448 63, 71, 105, 106, 115, 120, 124, 127, 134,
Musil, Robert 188 140, 156, 163, 168, 171, 277, 281,
Mussorgsky, Modest 225, 295, 310 321–324, 326, 329, 330–332, 337–342,
344–347, 349, 351, 353, 356–358, 362,
366, 414–416, 418, 426, 437, 442, 445,
Napoleon Bonaparte 159, 178
449
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques 295, 402, 446
Peirce, Jem 324
Naudin, Jean-Bernard 448
Peirce, Juliette 324
Neruda, Pablo 134, 259
Pekkilä, Erkki 418, 425
Nestroy, Johann 240
Pelagius 354
Nieminen, Paula 443
Pelc, Jerzy 426, 431
Nietzsche, Friedrich 138, 184, 378
Pellonpää, Matti 235
Nignon, Édouard 68, 251–253, 259, 263, 448
Penderecki, Krzysztof 448
Niiniluoto, Ilkka 433
Perron, Paul 444
Nikolai II (Russian Emperor) 252
Perry, Ralph Barton 324
Normet, Leo 428
Pesonen, Pekka 354, 375, 434, 449
Nöth, Winfried 16, 57, 58, 124, 128, 144, 150, Peter the Great (Russian czar) 381
389, 448 Petrilli, Susan 136, 156, 342–344, 346–350,
352, 353, 389, 432, 435, 449
Obolensky, Olga 256, 448 Peuranen, Erkki 72, 388
Occam, William 57, 59 Pezzini, Isabella 435
Oesch, Hans 443 Piatigorsky, Alexander 429
Oguibenin, Boris 429 Pierce, Alexandra 218
Oldenburg, S. F. 385 Pietarinen, Ahti-Veikko 437
Onur, Zeynep 188 Pihlström, Sami 123, 152, 449
Oppenheimer, Frank 450 Plato 122, 277, 343
Orosz, Magdolna Pikkarainen, Esa 163, 176, 177, 449
Orrego-Salas, Juan 453 Pinxten, Rik 430
Index | 463
Plisetskaya, Maya 230 Rinne, Pärttyli 51

Poe, Edgar Allan 108 Robel, Léon 452
Ponzio, Augusto 80, 111, 136, 139, 141, 147, Rocci, Andrea 434
156, 184, 349, 389, 406–412, 435, 449 Rosen, Charles 244
Popova, Maria 435 Rosenzweig, F. 448
Popper, Karl 62, 100 Rossellini, Roberto 233
Porges, Heinrich 220, 449 Rossi, Pentti 428
Posner, Roland 16, 104, 429, 430–432, 442 Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio 146–149, 406, 407,
Post, Emily 257, 449 449
Poulenc, Francis 290 Rossini, Giachino 84
Poussin, Nicolas 159, 160 Rouget, Gilbert 368
Prasama Pattanayak, Debi 430 Rouget de l’Isle 161
Presley, Elvis 247, 248 Rowell, Lewis 414–416, 418,
Probir 417 Royce, Josiah 22, 105, 106, 321–326, 328,
Prokofiev, Sergei 221, 368, 370 330–341, 345, 346, 352, 423, 442, 450,
Propp, Vladimir 71, 158, 368, 376, 378, 452
384–388, 391, 449 Roye, Katharine 323
Proust, Marcel 36, 46, 53, 91, 108, 109, 117, Rubinstein, Arthur 219, 220, 234, 404
134, 138, 146, 167, 213, 222, 250, 252, Rumi, Maulaana 243
259, 326, 378, 446 Runeberg, J. L. 240, 311, 312, 450
Ptolemy 101 Rushdie, Salman 31, 434
Pushkin, Alexander 355 Ruskin, John 105, 124, 125, 259, 260, 334,
Pyatigorsky, A. M. 453 345, 346, 355, 450
Russell, Bertrand 30, 103, 125, 328, 342,
Racine, Jean 11, 115, 137 443, 451
Rachmaninov, Sergei 219 Ruwet, Nicolas 402
Raffler-Engel, Walburga von 135, 182, 433 Ryan, Michael 196, 198, 450
Rameau, J. Ph. 94
Ratner, Leonard 88
Rauch, Irmengard 431 Saariaho, Kaija 161
Rautavaara, Einojuhani 285 Saint-Martin, Fernande 430
Rector, Monica 430 Salieri, Antonio 342
Reimas, Olavi (Unto Kalervo Eskola) 240, 241 Sallinen, Aulis 308, 309
Rein, K. G. T. 326 Salmenhaara, Erkki 296, 297, 299, 302, 376,
Reitala, Aimo 307, 452 377, 450
Rembrandt 168 Salomaa, E. 451
Remmel, Mart 299, 428 Salonen, Esapekka 303
Renoir, Jean 221, 233, 235, 241, 257 Salosaari, Kari 201, 215–219, 228, 234, 246,
Rethoré, Joëlle 430 303, 450
Réti, Rudolph 285, 292 Samson, Jim 98, 404
Reybrouck, Mark 219 Samuels, Robert 401, 402, 405, 450
Reznikoff, Iegor 429 Sand, George 138, 343, 414
Ricoeur, Paul 18, 166, 177–181, 185, 277, Santaella Braga, Lucia 413, 430
411, 449 Sarma 416
Rigolage, Emile 443 Sapir, Edward 146
Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai 376 Sarajas, Annamari 312, 450
Rink, John 219, 449 Sarje, Kimmo 451
464 | Index
Sartre, Jean-Paul 3, 4, 6, 21, 23–25, 40, 43, Senderens, Alain 448

64, 106, 108, 152, 185, 199, 321, 395, Serazzi, Giovanna 445
407, 409, 416, 446, 450 Sesemann, Vasily 382, 442
Saussure 4, 5, 10, 18, 21, 32, 47, 53, 56, 58, Sesemann, Wilhelm 127, 378, 380, 382, 383,
70, 77, 109, 176, 191, 269, 326, 403, 410, 392–397, 442, 451
411 Shakespeare, William 226
Schelling 3, 4, 6, 27, 67, 105, 273, 274, 450 Shannon, Claude Elwood 118, 406, 409
Schenker, Heinrich 220, 284, 292, 300 Shostakovich, Dmitry 368
Scherer, Klaus 146, 450 Showalter, Mary Emma 256, 451
Schiller, Friedrich v. 39, 42, 43, 272–276, Shukman, Ann 429
303, 450 Sibelius, Jean 91, 95, 117, 145, 283, 286–288,
Schlegel, A. W. 275, 278, 450 290, 292–304, 308–311, 314, 376, 415,
Schlegel, Friedrich 276 416, 433, 444–448, 450, 452
Schmidt, Anna Nikolaevna 366 Šklovsky, Viktor 368, 372, 383
Schmitz, H. Walter 342, 450, 451 Smith, John E. 447
Schiwy, Günther 400 Smith, Nicholas H. 449
Schneider, Romy 246, 246, 441 Snellman, J. W. 28, 103, 307, 308, 310, 315,
Scholem, G. 448 325, 326, 329, 330, 449, 451
Schönberg, Arnold 117, 286, 293, 326 Socrates 194
Schopenhauer, Artur 105, 107, 260, 357 Sõgel, Endel 428
Schrade, Leo 443 Solovyov, Mikhail 364
Schubert, Franz 93, 286, 306 Solovyov, Vladimir 6, 325, 354–366, 382
Schück, Henrick 110 Sonesson, Göran 80, 432, 451
Schumann, Clara 96 Sormunen, Markku 205
Schumann, Robert 84, 93, 94, 96, 198, 234, Souriau, Anne 451
290, 405 Souriau, Étienne 43, 50, 213, 214, 218,
Schütz, Alfred 41, 46, 50, 53, 71, 184, 208, 221–223, 234, 449, 451
353, 410, 411, 451 Spampinato, Francesco 448
Schütz, Heinrich 93, 94, 451 Spengler, Oswald 106, 199, 205, 451
Schwartz, Marcia 434 Spinoza, Baruch 273
Scriabin, Alexander 84, 91, 295, 371, Sriwastava, R. N. 430
376, 382 Stanislavsky, Konstantin 214
Scruton, Roger 190, 197, 451 Stefani, Gino 32, 84, 87, 139, 215, 221, 223,
Scudéry, Madeleine de 75, 109, 110 230, 402, 429, 445, 448
Seabra, José 427 Steiner, Peter 448
Searle 176, 216, 448 Stigell, Robert 261
Sebeok, Thomas A. 4, 15, 16, 42, 56, 62, 63, Stockhausen, Karlheinz 84, 285
111, 124, 134, 230, 259, 278, 306, 328, Stockinger, Peter 430
349, 384, 386, 387, 388, 408, 425–432, Stoianova, Ivanka 289, 292, 293, 296,
435, 436, 442, 451 404, 429
Seeger, Anthony 28, 225 Storelv, Sven 429
Seeger, Pete 248 Strauss, Richard 117, 243, 302
Segre, Cesare 431 Stravinsky, Igor 74, 84, 92, 221, 290, 297,
Seitajärvi, Juha 447 369, 370, 375, 381
Sekoni, Ropo 430 Strindberg, August 263
Sellars, Peter 373 Sukhova, Natalia 47
Senancour, Étienne Pivert de 79 Suni, Timo 375, 449
Index | 465
Suolahti, Eino E. 442 Ulanova, Galina 230

Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen 236, 237 Umiker-Sebeok, Jean 432, 451
Szépe, György 430 Uosukainen, Riitta 431, 438
Uotila, Aukusti 261
Tähti, Annikki 236 Uotinen, Jorma 192
Taine, Hippolyte 113–116 Uspensky, B. A. 306, 310, 453
Talvela, Martti 310
Talvi, Jussi 254, 255, 451 Vaala, Valentin (Valentin Ivanoff) 240, 241,
Tarasti, Eero 4, 5, 9, 11, 15, 72, 89, 145, 153, 447
164, 168, 198, 216, 234, 274, 291, 307, Vainio, Jan Mikael 161
329, 331, 346, 353, 357, 375, 388, 393, Vainiomäki, Tiina 56, 453
395, 400, 402, 404, 410, 430, 432, 441, Valentinus 354
445, 446, 451–453 Välimäki, Susanna 434
Taruskin, Richard 153, 381, 382, 452 Valkonen, Markku 453
Tasca, Norma 427 Valkonen, Olli 453
Tati, Jacques 235 Valnetov, Mikhail 365
Taylor, Charles 123, 124, 152, 181, 276, 278, Vallgren, Ville 114, 257, 261–265, 453
29, 295, 332, 412, 449, 452 Valsiner, Jaan 27, 34, 35, 67, 76, 184, 188,
Tawaststjerna, Erik 117, 287, 295, 296, 303, 206, 207, 452, 453
314, 452 Vattimo, Gianni 164
Tchaikovsky, Piotr 95 Vega, Carlos 86, 453
Thomas Aquinas 163 Veivo, Harri 45, 434, 437, 446, 453
Thompson, Stith 386, 388 Vélasquez, Diego 65, 312
Thoreau, Henry David 3 Verdi, Giuseppe 167, 224, 225, 342
Threadgold, Terry 430 Verlaine, Paul 261, 374
Tietjen, Heinz 238 Veron, Eliseo 150
Todorov, Tzvetan 71, 73, 74, 124, 452 Veselovsky, Alexander 384, 386
Tolstoi, Alexei 371 Victoria (Queen of England) 342
Tolstoi, Leo 43 107, 108, 136, 142, 158, 180, Vierimaa, Irma 446
452 Villa, Kyllikki 453
Tomashevsky, Boris 368, 375, 376 Villa-Lobos, Heitor 94
Tommila, Päiviö 307, 452 Villard, Pierre 257
Topelius, Zachris 309, 314–316, 452 Violi, Patrizia 430, 435
Toporov, V. N. 453 Visconti, Luchino 236, 246, 441
Torop, Peeter 111, 428, 436 Voigt, Vilmos 368, 375, 385, 386, 425, 426,
Trevarthen, Colwyn 429, 430, 433, 453
Trigo, Salvato 430 Volli, Ugo 119, 144, 279, 388, 435, 436, 453
Trubetskoy, Yevgeny 363, 380, 381 Voltaire 102
Tull, James 441 Vuori, Harri 161
Turgenev, Ivan 31
Turkka, Jouko 308, 309 Wagner, Cosima 220, 343
Tynyanov, Yuri 82, 368, 374, 393, 452 Wagner, Richard 16, 53, 84, 90, 92, 93, 107,
117, 118, 134, 161, 184, 192, 220, 224,
Uexküll, Jakob von 15, 24, 51, 52, 62, 66, 103, 226, 236–238, 257, 286, 295, 373, 384,
113, 118–120, 140, 200, 278–281, 289, 387, 424, 444, 449
300, 408, 436, 452, 453 Wagner, Winifred 238
Uexküll, Thure von 15, 66, 120, 281, 436, 450 Wagner, Wolfgang 373
466 | Index
Wahl, Jean 4, 127, 395 Withalm, Gloria 430–432

Waldenfels, Bernhard 453 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 449
Wallenius, Otto 261 Wodehouse, Pelham Grenville 257
Wąsik, Zdzisław 453 Worburton, Thomas 447
Waugh, Evelyn 167 Wright, G. H. von 56, 61, 107, 172–174, 183,
Weaver, Warren 118, 406, 409 195, 408, 453
Weber, Carl Maria von 96, 283 Wundt, Wilhelm 333, 354, 386
Webern, Anton 293
Wecksell, Julius 226 Yamaguchi, Masao 430, 440
Weiss, Peter 158–160, 453 Ylä-Kotola, Mauri 438
Welby, Victoria Lady 56, 342, 343–353, 366, Yli-Salomäki, Aki 161
443, 445, 449–451
Wells, Herman B. 426 Zarcone, Thierry 453
Welsch, Wolfgang 41, 333, 453 Ždanov, Andrei 368, 375
Weston, Judith 247 Zeffirelli, Franco 373
Whorf, Benjamin Lee 147 Zholdak, Andriy 373
Williams, Brook 426 Ziino, Agostino 452
Williams, Raymond 197 Žirmunsky, Viktor 375, 380, 382, 385, 386,
Willis, Paul 187, 188 393, 395
Wilson, Edward O. 269, 453 Zola, Émile 114, 261
Wiora, Walter 97 Zweig, Stefan 402, 453

Eero Tarasti - Sein Und Schein - Explorations in Existential Semiotics-Walter de Gruyter (2015)

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Sein und Schein

Sein und Schein

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

© 2015 Walter de Gruyter Inc., Berlin/Boston

So we are here on the way to a synthesis of both semiotic and philosophical

Helsinki, January 2015 Eero Tarasti

Part I Philosophy: Varieties of Being

1 Existential semiotics today: Sein (Being) and Schein (Appearing) | 3

2 On the appearance or the present structure and existential digressions

4 The concept of genre: In general and in music | 70

5 The world and its interpretation | 100

6 Signs around Us – Umwelt, Semiosphere and Signscape | 113

Part II Doing: Society and Culture

7 Semio-crises in the era of globalisation: Towards a new theory

7.2 The lesson of semiocrises | 134

8 Ideologies manifesting axiologies | 144

9 Semiotics of resistance: Being, memory, history, and the

10 Culture and transcendence | 182

Part III Lesser Arts

11 A proposal for a semiotic theory of performing arts | 213

12 On culinemes, gastrophemes, and other signs of cooking | 249

13.A Metaphors of nature and organicism | 269

13.B Metaphors of nature and organicism in the epistemology

14 Finland in the eyes of a semiotician | 306

15 From absolute spirit to the community of interpretation: Josiah Royce

16 Victoria Lady Welby – A pioneer of semiotic thought rediscovered

17 Vladimir Solovyov | 354

18 Russian formalism in the global semiotics – Precursor of the

19 Wilhelm Sesemann in the context of semiotics | 392

20 Roland Barthes or the birth of semiotics from the spirit

21 The right of unfunctionality – Explorations in Ponzio’s

23 Can Semiotics be organized? Observations over

1.2 A return to basic ideas

Modalities appear in the grammar of some languages as modal or special sub-

1.4 Dasein and transcendence

Figure 1.1: The Model of Dasein

Negation, for example, may mean the following:

Affirmation, in turn, may mean the following:

1.5 Turn-around of Dasein

Figure 1.2: The turn-around of Dasein

Figure 1.3: The counter-current of Dasein

As mentioned earlier, existential semiotics conceives of signs to be in constant

values → modalities → signs

Figure 1.4: The enactment of values

esty or of keeping promises. However, somebody does something contrary (e.g.,

Figure 1.5: Reaction to a value-act

hold his community responsible; e.g., his “senders” in narratological terms

1.7 New types of signs

2 On the Ich-Ton principle in music, see Tarasti 2002: 98, 109.

1.8 More on transcendence

Transcendence is not a concept that we are used to encountering in the semiotic

Figure 1.6: Communication according to de Saussure. In fact, it is a transcendental act

We might, then, refer to the incarnation of transcendence as a sign its “first

his Dasein. In front of the unknown atemporal and anti-narrative transcendence,

derline, does he realize the true plenitude of transcendence. This experience is

1.10 The subject reconsidered: BEING

Figure 1.7: Moi/Soi

The figure may be interpreted as follows:

Figure 1.8: Moi and Soi on the semiotic square

Figure 1.9: Moi and soi, overlapping

1.11 Questions by a subject: From BEING to DOING