1.5.5. Sign vs. text
The so-called signifying chain produces texts which carry with them the recollection of the intertextuality which nourishes them. Texts generate, or are capable of generating, multiple (and ultimately infinite) readings and interpretations. It was argued, for instance, by the later Barthes, by the recent Derrida, and by Kristeva, that signification is to be located exclusively in the text. The text is the locus where meaning is produced and becomes productive (signifying practice). Within its texture, the signs of the dictionary (as codifying equivalences) can emerge only by a rigidification and death of all sense. This critical line takes up Buyssens’ argument (communication is given only at the level of sentence), but it goes deeper. A text is not simply a communicational apparatus.
It is a device which questions the previous signifying systems, often renews them, and sometimes destroys them. Finnegans Wake — a textual machine made to liquidate grammars and dictionaries — is exemplary in this sense, but even rhetorical figures are produced and become alive only at the textual level. The textual machine empties the terms which the lit-eral dictionary deemed univocal and well defined, and fills them with new content figures. Yet, the production of a metaphor such as the king of the forest (where a figure of humanity is added to lions and an animal property reverberates on the class of kings) implies the existence of both /king/ and /lion/ as functives of two previously codified sign-functions. If signs (expressions and content) did not preexist the text, every metaphor would be equivalent simply to saying that something is some-thing. But a metaphor says that that (linguistic) thing is at the same time something else.
The ability of the textual manifestations to empty, destroy, or recon-struct pre-existing sign-functions depends on the presence within the sign-function (that is, in the network of content figures) of a set of in-structions oriented toward the (potential) production of different texts. (This concept will be further developed in 1.9.) It is in this sense that the thematization of textuality has been particularly suggestive.
1.5.6. The sign as identity
The sign is supposed to be based on the categories of ‘similitude’ or identity’. This presumed fallacy renders the sign coherent with the ideological notion of the subject. The subject as a presupposed tran-scendenta1 unity which opens itself to the world. (or to w h i c h the world opens) through the act of representation, as well as the subject that transfers its representations onto other subjects in the process of com-munication, is supposedly a philosophical fiction dominating all of the history of philosophy. Let us postpone the discussion of this objection and see now in what sense the notion of sign is seen to be coherent with the (no longer viable) notion of subject:
Under the mask of socialization or of mechanistic realism, ideological lin-guistics, absorbed by the science of signs, turns the sign-subject into a cen-ter. The sign-subject becomes the beginning and the end of all translinguistic activity; it becomes closed up in itself, located in its own word, which is conceived of by positivism as a kind of ‘psychism’ residing in the brain. (Kristeva 1969:69)
The statement above implies the identification of the sign with the linguistic sign, where the linguistic sign is based on the equivalence model: p = q. In point of fact, Kristeva defines the sign as «resemblance»:
The sign brings separate instances (subject-object on one hand, subject-interlocutor on the other) back to a unified whole (a unity which presents itself as a sentence-message), replacing praxis with a single meaning, and difference with resemblance, . . . The relationship instituted by the sign will therefore be a reconciliation of discrepancies, and identiftcanon of differences. (Ibid., pp. 70, 84)
It seems, however, that such a criticism can apply only to a degenerate notion of linguistic sign, rooted on the equivalence model. The problem is to see whether and to what extent this notion has ever been supported by the most mature theories of signs. For instance, the notion of sign as resemblance and identity does not appear in Peirce: «A sign is some-thing by knowing which we know something more» (C. P. 8.332). The sign is an instruction for interpretation, a mechanism which starts from an initial stimulus and leads to all its illative consequences.
Starting from the sign, one goes through the whole semiotic process and arrives at the point where the sign becomes capable of contradicting itself (otherwise, those textual mechanisms called ‘literature’ would not be possible). For Peirce, the sign is a potential proposition (as even Kristeva [1974:43] notes). In order to comprehend this notion of sign, we need to recon-sider the initial phase of its historical development. Such reconsideration requires the elimination of an embarrassing notion, that of linguistic sign. Since this notion is after all a late cultural product, we shall postpone its treatment until later.
1.6. Signs vs. words
The term which the Western philosophical tradition has translated as signum was originally the Greek sêméîon (σημειον). It appeared as a technical-philosophical term in the fifth century, with Parmenides and Hippocrates. It is often found as a synonym of tekmerion (τεκμηριον: proof, clue, symptom). A first distinction between the two terms appears
only with Aristotle’s Rhetoric.
Hippocrates took the notion of clue from the physicians who came before him. Alcmeon said that «the Gods have immediate knowledge of invisible and mortal things, but men must ‘proceed by clues’ Signs (τεκμαίρεβθαι)» (D. К., B1). The Cnidarian physicians knew the value of symptoms. Apparently, they codified them in the form of equiva-lences. Hippocrates maintained that the symptom is equivocal if it is not analyzed contextually, taking into account the air, the water, the en-vironment, the general state of the body, and the regimen which is likely to modify the situation. Such a model functions as if to say: if p then q, but only with the concurrence of factors у and z. A code exists, but it is not a univocal one.
Hippocrates was not interested in linguistic signs. In any event, it appears that at the time the term ‘sign’ was not applied to words. A word was a name (onoma, ‘ονομα). Parmenides made use of this difference when he opposed the truth of the thought concerning Being to the illusory nature of opinions and the fallacy of sensations. Now, if representations are deceptive, names are nothing but equally deceptive levels superim-posed on the objects that we think we know. Onomazein (Όνομάζειν) is always used by Parmenides in order to give an arbitrary name, which is deemed to be true but does not actually correspond to the truth. The name establishes a pseudoequivalence with reality, and in doing so it conceals it. On the other hand, Parmenides uses the term ‘signs’ (semata: σήματα) When he speaks of evidence, of an inferential principle: «That Being exists, there are signs» (D. К., В8.2).
With Plato and Aristotle words are analyzed from a double point of view: (a) the difference between signifier and signified and (b) the difference between signification and reference. Signification (that is, mean-ing) says what a thing is, and in this sense it is a function performed also by single terms; in the act of reference one says, on the contrary, that a thing is, and in this sense reference is a function performed only by complete sentences. Throughout his whole work on logic and language, Aristotle is reluctant to use the term sign (semeîon) for words.
At first glance, contrary evidence is provided by the well-known page of De Interpretation, 16a, where it seems that it is said that words are signs. But this page requires some careful interpretation. Firstj Aristotle says that both spoken and written words are symbols (σνμβολά) of the affections of the soul. Then he says that spoken and written words are not the same for all human beings, since (as it is restated in 16a2O— 30) thеу are posited by convention. In this sense, words are different from the sounds emitted by animals. Words are conventional and arbitrary, whereas other kinds of sounds are natural and motivated. It is evident that Aristotle reserves the term symbol for spoken and written words (see also Di Cesare 1981 and Lieb 1981).
It must be noticed that symbol was at that time, as a philosophical term, more neutral than sign. The notion of sign was already introduced and discussed by the Hippocratic tradition as a precise category, whereas symbol was generally used as «token» or «identification mark» (see Chap-ter 4 of this book).
On the same page (16a.5), Aristotle says that the affections of the soul are likenesses, or images, or copies of things, and as such they cannot be studied in a logical (linguistic) framework. Therefore they will be dealt with in De Anima. In stressing this difference between mental images and words, he states, incidentally, that spoken and written words are signs (semeia) of the affections of the soul. Thus prima fade he equates signs with symbols.
One could object that in this context sign is used in a metaphorical way. But one should make a more radical remark. If Aristotle was follow-ing the terminological criterion he also follows in Rhetoric, /signs/ still means «proof», «clue», «symptom». If this is true, he is
