On the study of semiotics -- a review

On the study of semiotics
by Azly Rahman



[excerpt from a paper on hegemony and cybernetics, written at Columbia University, circa 2004]

Much of the writings on the origin, development, and refinement of semiotics lie in the field of linguistics and the study of the way language structures, restructures, or alters reality. Plato’s collection of dialogues on Socrates brings awareness to the idea of reality versus appearance in how we conceive and perceive existence. There is imperfection in existence since human beings are thought to live a mediated life. Plato in his work on this subject, especially in Phaedo (Plato, 1954/1961) and The Republic (Plato, 1993) believed that there is a perfect and an imperfect world known respectively as, Essence and Forms.

This theory of knowledge, known popularly as “The Doctrine of Reminiscence” derived from Plato’s Allegory of the Cave proposes that humanity is thought to be conditioned by a mediated world of signs and symbols that cloud true consciousness (Plato). The Christian notion of “word becomes flesh” (Rahner, 1985), the Islamic idea that the Koran is a book of signs (Armstrong, 1993; Cleary, 1993; Nasr, 1964; Schimmel, 1985), and that it is believed that the human struggle in this world is a “jihad” or a constant and theologically-demanded struggle against falsehood in accordance with what is decreed by the book of signs, and the Hindu belief that the whole world is a manifestation of the syllable “Om” (Radhakrishnan & Moore, 1957)—all these are the notions of the centrality of signs and symbols in analyzing the phenomena of existence itself, when looked at from the point of view of theology.

Hence, the Platonic and religious perspectives of the individual in his/her environment were meant to explain, in genres such as prose and poetry, the forces that define the subjective experience of existence (Abdulla, 2000; Buber, 1958; Kegan, 1982). Writings on the idea of humanity and signs and symbols continue to be produced in subsequent periods having their parallel development in the historical march of literature and philosophy.

Writers in the Romantic tradition, particularly Byron, Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth write about the superiority of the human intellect, sense awareness, and the Platonic God (Abrams, 1971) poetizing and narrating the predicament and fate of humanity at the advent of the Industrial Revolution. One might argue that the Romantic period in Western literature precursored the age of Western existential thought of which France and French Algeria for examples, became fertile grounds of powerful analyses concerning the subjectivity of humanity in the face of the structures it lives in (Camus, 1975; Fanon, 1967; Memmi, 1957/1965; Sartre, 1975).

In the twentieth century, Humanity as it exists in history and materiality, continues to be a theme of philosophical inquiry. The question of the influence of signs and symbols on consciousness and how they are situated within the material environment the individual is in, is further explored either directly or indirectly especially by existentialist philosophers and writers such as Camus, Kafka, Kiekergaard, and Sartre, (Kaufmann, 1975) and in plays written in the genre of Absurd Theatre by playwrights such as Beckett and Ionesco (Esslin, 2001; Matthews, 1974). The idea of existentialism and the human condition, particularly concerning the meaningfulness of existence in the face of human conditions such as hunger, poverty, discrimination, war, and oppression as written by French philosophers (e.g. Sartre, 1975) became a common theme of inquiry in the arts and humanities.

In much earlier writing on this subject, one can find inspiration from the radically existentialist philosophies that grew from a critique of Marxism (see for example, Bakunin, 1953). In Southeast Asia, works of literature especially in the decades characterized by the struggle against colonialism, reflect existentialist themes that attempt to put the human self as victims of systems of signs and symbols created by those who owns the means of intellectual, cultural, and material production (see for example Rendra,1979; Toer, 1993). Contemporary Marxist scholars continue to link the necessity for the existence of signs and symbols to formation, development, proliferation, and sustenance of ideology (Eagleton, 1991).

As the twentieth century comes to a close, the field of semiotics began to emerge as an analytical discipline in the study of how language liberates or oppresses. One can now be introduced to terms such as “social semiotics,” “discourse analysis,” “critical discourse analysis,” and others that attempt to suggest that researchers look at signs and symbols from a more sophisticated structuralist perspective in order to further understand the human condition particularly in the age of cybernetics wherein raging philosophical debates is taking place on how the self is a product of a mediated process; one that is not only conditioned by the media (Chomsky, 1989, 2001; Gitlin, 1983; Parenti, 1993) but also by the Internet (Turkle, 1997).

In the emerging field of Cultural Studies media theorists writing in the tradition of the Frankfurt School of Social Research (Geuss, 1981; Jay, 1973; Kellner, 1989), and those schooled in French Structuralism see the study of humanity in the ideological and built environment as imperative (see for examples Ang, 1985; de Certeau, 1984; Hall, 1993; Jameson, 1988, 1991; Lefebvre, 1996; Williams, 1977). And theorists trained in the Soviet school of “social semiotics” see the field as valuable and inseparable to the study of human beings and cybernetics (Ivanov, 1977).

Citing names such as Barzini, de Saussure, Durkheim, Godel, and Pierce as pioneering contributors, Lekomcev (1977) for example, writes about the multivariate fields the study of semiotics has evolved from. It is also believed that the field of semiotics has its origin in the work of the Russian philosopher Volosinov (Eagleton, 1991). Others have written about the study of “texts” as socially discursive formations (see for example Fairclough, 1992); drawing inspiration from literary themes that conceive the human experience as narrative pieces that tells stories with a major plot and countless subplots, or in terminologies popularly known as Grand and Subaltern narratives.

In a similar vein, Said (1978) though not necessarily a semiotician wrote on the idea that perceptions can be shaped by one’s cultural and ideological backgrounds that consequently shape the production of knowledge, as in the case of the Western perception and conception of the “Orient.” Semiotics, nonetheless might arguably begin with the work of Saussure (1916/1983) and is developed further by, amongst major semioticians, Eco (1976) and Kristeva (1980).

My methodology in looking at social phenomena is informed by such development of semiotics described in the preceding paragraphs. In studying the origin of new cities and technopoles such as Cyberjaya, I take the perspective of methodological design from such a notion of “texts” and its inter-textuality as Kristeva (1980) would analyze, and how concepts such as power, language, and action inter-relates. Hence, the methodology employed includes the analyses of the political actor, corporate brochures, policy speech texts, and photographs of the physical landscape and inscriptions in the area of the MSC. These are the sources of triangulation I used in reading of the multi-textual signs and symbols and how they in turn, can and ought to be analyzed for example, as many a Critical Theorist might propose, through the methodological lens of ideologikritik (see Habermas, 1971).




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