I am referring to what in A Theory of Semiotics (0.7) I had defined as «the lower threshold of semiotics,» excluding it from a discussion in which an attempt was made to work out a semiotics of cultural relations, the only one that made any sense if the Dynamical Object was considered a terminus ad quern of the processes of signification and reference. But we are now considering the Dynamical Object as a terminus a quo, and therefore this natural semiosis {a parte objecti) must be taken into consideration.
With all due caution: in no way am I repudiating the distinction (which remains fundamental) between signal and sign, between dyadic processes of stimulus-response and triadic processes of interpretation, so that only in the full expansion of this last do phenomena such as signification, intentionality, and interpretation (however you wish to consider them) emerge. I am admitting with Prodi (1977) that to understand the higher cultural phenomena, which clearly do not spring from nothing, it is necessary to assume that certain «material bases of signification» exist, and that these bases lie precisely in this disposition to meet and interact that we can see as the first manifestation (not yet cognitive and certainly not mental) of primary iconism.
In this sense the elementary condition of semiosis would be a physical state whereby one structure is willing to interact with another (Prodi would have said: «Is willing to be read by»). In a debate between immunologists and semioticians in which the immunologists maintained that phenomena of «communication» occurred on a cellular level (Sercarz et al. 1988), what was at stake was to decide if some phenomena of «recognition» on the part of lymphocytes in the immune system could be dealt with in terms of «sign,» «meaning,» and «interpretation» (see the same problem in Edelman 1992, III, 8). I am still wary of extending beyond the lower threshold of semiosis terms that indicate higher cognitive phenomena; but it is certain that we need to postulate what I am presently calling primary iconism to explain why and how «T lymphocytes have the capacity to distinguish infected from normal macrophages because they recognize as signs of abnormality small bacterial fragments on the macrophage surface» (Eichmann 1988: 163). Let us eliminate from this context the word «signs» and allow terms such as «to recognize» a metaphorical value (by rejecting the notion that a lymphocyte recognizes something in the same way that we recognize the faces of our parents); let us also refrain from commenting upon the fact that many immunologists think that the lymphocyte also makes some «choices» with regard to alternative situations. The fact remains that, in the situation cited, two somethings meet because they correspond to each other, as a screw corresponds to the female thread.
In the course of the same debate, Prodi (1988: 55) commented:
An enzyme … selects its substrate from among a number of meaningless molecules with which it can collide: it reacts and forms a complex only with its partner molecule. This substrate is a sign for the enzyme (for its enzyme). The enzyme explores reality and finds what corresponds to its own shape: it is a lock that seeks and finds its own key. In philosophical terms, an enzyme is a reader that «categorizes» reality by determining the set of all the molecules that can react with it factually … This semiotics (or proto-semiotics) is the basic feature of the entire biological organization (protein synthesis, metabolism, hormonal activity, the transmission of nervous impulses, and so on).
Yet again I would refrain from using terms such as «sign,» but it is beyond doubt that when we come up against this lock that seeks its own key, we come up against a protosemiotics, and it is to this protosemiotic disposition that I would tend to give the name of natural primary iconism.
Every time I wondered how I would have reorganized A Theory of Semiotics if I had to write it again now, I would say to myself that I would have begun at the end, i.e., by putting the part on modes of sign production at the beginning. It would have been interesting to begin instead by starting with what happens when, subjected to the pressure of the Dynamical Object, one decides to consider it a terminus a quo. Had I begun from the end, I would have to return to the pages of the book where (taking my cue from Volli 1972) I identified congruencies (i.e., casts) as being among the first modalities of the production (and recognition) of signs (Eco 1976, 3.6.9).
On that occasion I was interested in how, starting from a cast, where at each point in the physical space of the expression there is a corresponding point in the physical space of an impresser, «by reverse transformation» one could infer the nature of the impresser. I started from the example of a death mask, because I was interested in the object as a terminus ad quem of an already conscious process of the interpretation and recognition of a sign. I was so interested in the relation of construction of a possible content of the sign that I was prepared to consider also cases of interpretation of a death mask that was not such but, rather, the simulation of a nonexistent impresser. Now all we have to do is take up the example again and focus the attention not on the moment in which the cast is «read» but on the moment in which it produces itself (and it produces itself by itself, without the action of a conscious being who intends to produce a sign destined for interpretation, an expression that must then be correlated with a content).
We would then be at a beginning, still presemiotic, where something is pressed onto something else. Only afterward could anyone, finding the concavity that something convex had produced, begin to project backward, in an attempt to infer what could have been there before from what is there now, with regard to which what is there now can be assumed as an impression, and therefore an icon. But at this point an objection would arise.
If primary iconism is to be considered this way, how can we define the moment of Firstness using the metaphor of the cast or the impression, which calls for an impressing agent, and therefore an original contact, a comparison, a de facto correspondence between two elements? By virtue of that very fact we would already be in Secondness. Let us think of the process of the transmission of genetic inheritance, which we were talking about earlier: therein we have an occurrence of steric phenomena, a series of correspondences, and therefore we would have a stimulus-response process that already has to do, from a Peircean standpoint, with Secondness. Peirce would probably have been the first to agree: he said on many occasions that Firstness can be prescinded (logically) from Secondness but cannot occur in its absence (see Ransdell 1979: 59). Therefore, in talking of primary iconism as a cast, we are talking not of actuated correspondence but of a predisposition to correspond, of «likeness» through the complementary nature of one element with respect to another to come.
Natural primary iconism would be the quality proper to impressions that still have not found (necessarily) their impresser but that are ready to «recognize it.» But if we know that that impression is ready to receive its own impresser, and if we know the ways of the impression to come (the natural law whereby only this screw can be screwed into this screw thread), then we can infer (if the impression is theoretically seen as a sign) the form of the impresser from the impression. Exactly the same way in which (as we shall be saying later) in the course of the perceptual process we can—from that unrelated sensation elsewhere called the Ground—construct the Immediate Object of something that should possess, among other qualities, that quality as well.
It may seem paradoxical to talk of the icon, which Peirce held was the first moment of an absolute evidence, as pure disposition-to, of pure absence in some way, an image of a thing that is not there yet. It would seem that this primary icon is like a hole, given that we have everyday experience of it but nonetheless have difficulty defining it, and given that 152 can be recognized only as an absence within something that is present (see Casati and Varzi 1994). And yet it is precisely from that nonbeing that one can infer the shape of the «plug» that could stop it up. But since by talking of holes we already enter the realm of metaphysics (and we have said that primary iconism cannot be understood if not in initially metaphysical terms), I should like to mention another page of metaphysics, the text in which Leibniz talks of one and zero ( De organo sive arte magna cogitandi) and identifies two fundamental concepts: «God himself, and also nothingness, that is to say privation: which is
