Eero Tarasti

What is existential semiotics? From theory to application

Background

During the past fifteen years I have been elaborating a new theory of semiotic inquiry, starting
from its philosophical and epistemic premises. I have called this project Existential semiotics due
to its roots in continental philosophy – following the line
Kant-Hegel-Kierkegaard-Jaspers-Heidegger-Arendt-Sartre-de Beauvoir-Marcel-Wahl – and in the history
of semiotics via its various generations: classic, structuralist/post-structuralist, and postmodern
thinkers. In fact this enterprise has led me almost to the borderlines of semiotics, since the new
configuration of knowledge that I propose has become so strongly philosophical and so close to
certain hermeneutical and phenomenological approaches, that it may be at first difficult to see its
link to the whole tradition of semiotic studies.

As to the latter, my new theory does not aim to show that “classical semiotic thought” has become
outdated; rather, it is still valid, but within the limits of a new, more encompassing theory.
Coming from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism (I was his only Finnish student, having studied
with him in Paris in 1973–1975, then doing research in Brazil in 1976 following his ideas) and from
the Paris School of semiotics founded by Lithuanian born semiotician and linguist Algirdas Julien
Greimas, I remain faithful to those classic authors. On the other hand, I am forging an independent
theory that can no longer be confined within the framework of Parisian semiotics. In the semiotic
context and tradition I would call my theory a “neosemiotics”. It is no longer a “post-” phenomenon
(like poststructuralism or postmodernism) but something new, in that it purports to represent
21^st-century thought and, as a philosophy of our time, engages with challenges of the present era.

My new theory is not a return to “existentialism”, as its title might suggest. Rather, I am
reconsidering and rethinking the foundations of semiotics in the light of certain philosophers, who
have paid attention to such notions as subject, Dasein, transcendence, situation, existence and
value. Basically what this involves is a scrutiny of “semiosis”, the process of production of signs
and meaning, from the inside, so to speak. I am interested in how signs become signs and,
particularly, how they are preceded by what I call “presigns”, i.e., virtual, transcendental
entities. In the most abstract form these presigns are values, axiological entities; in more
concrete form, they are “ideas” which, say, an artist may have, prior to their being actualized,
transformed, or transcribed into what I call “actsigns”. Moreover, when actsigns are performed or
received by the community in which signs are conveyed, they become “post-signs”; i.e., they are
realized and exercise their “real” impact upon the destinatees.

Such a theoretical scheme is essentially based on two fundamental categories of an ontological
nature: Dasein and transcendence. The first term (literally, “Being-there”) I leave untranslated
from the German, because of its subtle meaningfulness. It is simply the world in which we as
subjects live, surrounded by other subjects and objects with which we try to come to terms. In
structuralist narratology, a primal “desire” to be conjuncted/disjuncted was viewed as the “initial
force” behind narrative processes, and this holds true also in existential semiotics, within the
limits of Dasein. Note that here Dasein is not only “my Being-There”, as it was for Heidegger, but
also covers other subjects and objects. Still, we feel our Dasein to be incomplete, lacking
something, and this catalyses our wish and longing for the transcendent. That is how Sartre
explained the notion of transcendence – i.e., as a lack in Dasein which forces us to go beyond its
borderlines – as did phenomenological sociologists such as Alfred Schutz and Thomas Luckmann.

Transcendence is the realm beyond the concrete world of Dasein which our subject can reach via two
acts, negation and affirmation. In the first case the subject realizes “Nothingness” in the
Hegelian or existentialist sense, with its anguishing psychic reflections; in the latter, as
“plenitude” (Gr., pleroma; Lat., plena), understood as an archetypal experience of the universe as
full of meanings rather than devoid of them – an experience endorsed by the Gnostics, and described
as well by modern philosophers (e.g., Vladimir Soloviev) and semioticians (e.g, Eco 1990).

Already this theoretical outline seems to stray from common semiotic thought, but when we return to
sign studies we will notice how radical the consequences are for the latter. Namely, entirely new
sign categories emerge from the traffic of signs between Dasein and transcendence. These are new
categories of sign – to use the term by C. S. Peirce – and thus far I have been able to enumerate
at least the following ones: presigns, actsigns, postsigns, endosigns, exosigns, transsigns,
as-if-signs, genosigns, phenosigns. But even more fundamentally, we can now reinterpret the entire
classical semiotic approach as a kind of transcendental science (in the Kantian sense).
Traditionally semiotics has been considered to consist of two great inquiries: one dealing with
signification, the other with communication.

Every sign is, in fact, a transcendental unit, in light of the classical medieval definition of
sign as aliquid stat pro aliquo (something standing for something). This means the following: by
signs we talk and think of objects which are absent. The most serviceable definition of the
transcendental might be as follows: the transcendent is anything that is absent, but present in our
minds.

The second essential field of semiotics is communication, i.e., how we use signs to transmit
meanings and content to others. In Saussure’s classical model of dialogue (1916), Mr A says
something to Mr B. Yet we might say that a huge gap separates A from B. Mr B is a “transcendent
entity” to Mr A, since Mr B represents what might be philosophically called the alien-psychic
(Fremdseelig). The only certain thing, phenomenologically, is Mr A’s stream of consciousness, which
may be called “self-” or “auto-psychic” (Eigenseelig). Therefore in every act of communication Mr A
risks being misunderstood by his partner in dialogue. And yet the space between them is not empty,
but filled by what Greimas called modalities. In the theory of existential semiotics I distinguish
traditional linguistic and logical modalities, which concern life in Dasein, from metamodalities,
which portray communication between Dasein and transcendence.

A theory of subject

All this leads us to reconsider the role of the subject in communication and signification, the
aspect so strongly criticised and denied by structuralist semioticians ever since Lévi-Strauss’s
The Savage Mind (1962), which rejected the Sartrean theory of subjective “dialectics”. Yet the
subject re-entered semiotics in its poststructuralist phase in the 1980s, in the work of many
scholars, from Julia Kristeva to Michel Foucault and, in a certain sense, Roland Barthes and A. J.
Greimas, with his “third semiotic revolution” – which meant nothing other than the (re)discovery of
values and of the modalities, as the ways in which speakers provide their utterances with emotions,
expectations, and psychic contents.

If we want to understand the basic problem of every society – namely, why individuals obey its
rules and become “socialized” by it – we see this is made possible only by the fact that social
rules and laws are somehow “internalized” into a subject’s mind. The society must be “inside”,
otherwise it would have no impact but remain a matter of indifference to the subject. How can we
explain this process of internalisation and clarify its mechanisms?

There has been much talk about subjects and subjectivity in many neighbouring areas of semiotics,
such as psychoanalysis, gender theories, social sciences, philosophy, arts research, etc. Yet,
without a more articulated vision of how the subject appears in the fields of communication and
signification, such theoretical views stop short of their goals, as laudable as their efforts might
be.

To do so requires a short excursion to the roots of existential semiotics, which means going back
to Hegel and his logics. For some semioticians Hegel is mere “conceptual poetry”; to others, he is
acceptable only after a “Marxist turn-around”, but to still others, like Hannah Arendt, he was the
most central thinker of Western philosophy, one who compiled phenomena of nature and history into a
homogeneous construction – but as Arendt notes, whether prison or palace, we cannot say. For
Arendt, Hegel was the last word in Western philosophy. All that came after him was either imitated
him or rebelled against him. Contemporary schools of thought, which in Arendt’s case were Husserl,
Heidegger and Jaspers, constituted mere epigones of Hegel.

I take as my starting point only one detail from Hegelian logic, the principle by which we may
construct further our theory of subject; namely, his categories of an-sich-sein (being-in-itself)
and für-sich-sein (being-for-itself). In the Hegel dictionary edited by Michael Inwood there is an
entry entitled “In for, and in and for, itself, himself …” (Inwood 1992: 133–136). The third person
reflexive pronoun in German, sich, is both singular and plural, and covers all three genders. It
may thus mean one-, him-, her-, or itself; themselves; each other. It may be either accusative or
dative, but not nominative or genitive. It accompanies German’s numerous reflexive verbs, and can
also be preceded by several prepositions. For example für sich (for oneself, himself, etc.) occurs
in such contexts as “He needs a room for himself”, “She lives by herself”, and “That is a problem
in itself”, that is to say, apart from its connections with other matters. In ordinary usage an
sich (in itself, etc.) often differs little from für sich: to consider a matter an sich is also to
consider it apart from its connections with anything else; and if something is certain an sich, its
certainty is IMMEDIATE, and not dependent on anything else. In both these contexts, an und für sich
is simply a more emphatic equivalent of an sich.

In ordinary German such expressions usually do not have a single, well-defined usage, but a range
of uses overlapping those of other expressions. The only one that had acquired a settled
philosophical use by Hegel’s day was an sich. In Plato it meant the form or idea; e.g., the form of
beauty is “the beautiful itself”, or an sich. For Kant a thing an sich is something apart from its
relation to our cognition and the way it appears to us. Thus an sich contrasts not with für sich
but with in uns or für uns.

Hegel used the terms an sich and für sich in their ordinary senses, but also provided them with
contrasting meaning. As finite, a thing has a determinate nature only in virtue of its relation
with other things, its 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 overt determinate character; at most, it has potential character, which will be
actualized only by its relations to other things. For example, an infant an sich is only
potentially rational, not actually so. A tailor is a tailor an sich in the sense of having certain
innate skills that suit him for this role, and of having certain overt features which 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,
an “I”, and as such can distance himself from his role and think of himself just as me or I. When
doing so, he is no longer for others, but for himself. For instance, consider a bus driver who has
already left but notices one person still running to the stop. Against the rules he stops and takes
on the passenger, since he feels compassion for the late arrival. Although his self-consciousness
may presuppose recognition by others, an I is not just one in a system of contrasting roles:
everyone is an I.

Furthermore, the idea that “if something is for itself, it is aware of itself”, leads to the notion
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 is a future doctor and
professor, but he does not know it. Finally, the terms an sich and für sich start to mean potential
and actual, and may be applied to the subject’s development: when a person becomes “for himself”
what he is “in himself”, he usually recognizes his identity: he becomes meaningful to himself (to
use semiotic terms).

The preceding linguistic excursion was probably necessary in order to understand the next
reasoning, in which we proceed toward a theory of individual subjectivity. But before we turn Hegel
to existential-semiotic use, let us look what Søren Kierkegaard did with the notions of an sich and
für sich. In him they turn into subjective and objective being. In the chapter “Becoming a
subject”, in his treatise Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Kierkegaard 1846/1992), he speaks
about an individual who is said to be a subject, or such an individual “who is what he is because
he has become like it.” In existential semiotics, such a subject who has become himself may be
considered a genosign. The advent 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 sees the task of a
subject as “more and more to take off his subjectivity and become more and more objective.” The
objective being is the same as observing and being observed. 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 largely based upon Hegelian concepts of an sich and für sich, or in Satre’s terms:
être-en-soi and être-pour-soi. According to Sartre, being simply is; it cannot help but be. But it
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 is thus 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. This, according to Sartre, is the beginning of
transcendence: human reality strives for something which it lacks (Sartre 1943: 124–125). Man
starts to exist when he realizes the incompleteness of his being. Also 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, as regards Hegel, is the movement between these two categories, and a
kind of subjectivisation of them considering existence.

We need still one more “modernisation” of Hegel and his categories. It has been offered by Jacques
Fontanille in his study Soma et séma: Figures du corps (Fontanille 2004). The author deals with
corporeal semiotics, but presents the distinction between categories of Moi and Soi in a fresh
manner.

As a Greimassian semiotician 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, the material resistance or impulse to semiotic processes. The body is the sensorial,
motor fulcrum of semiotic experience (Fontanille 2004: 22). Yet, on the other hand there is a body
in the proper sense, which constitutes the identity and directional principle of the body. The body
is the carrier of the “me” (Moi) whereas the proper body supports the “self”, or Soi (ibid.:
22–23). The Soi, or “self”, builds itself in discursive activity. The Soi is that part of ourselves
which the “me” (Moi) projects out of itself in order 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 a reflexivity which it needs in order to keep within its limits as it changes. The Moi resists
and forces the Soi to confront its own alterity. Hence, the two are inseparable.

Although Fontanille is a semiotician (and here quotes Paul Ricoeur), his reasoning fits well with
the above-mentioned Hegelian categories. What is involved is a new interpretation of an sich and
für sich, the first one corresponding to bodily ego and the latter to its stability, identity, and
aspiration outwards – that is, to Sartrean negation. The self (Soi) functions as a kind of memory
of the body (Moi); it yields form to those traces of tensions and needs which have been inserted in
the flesh of the “me”, or Moi.

In light of Fontanille’s concepts, we could change the Hegelian Being-in-itself or
Being-for-itself, the an-sich-sein and für-sich-sein, into an-mir-sein and für-mich-sein, i.e.,
Being-in-myself and Being-for-myself. But before we ponder the consequences this has for our
existential semiotics, let us scrutinize the principles of Moi and Soi as such, and in music
particularly. 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.

Let us take Uexküll’s (1940) principle of Ich-Ton, which determines the identity and individuality
of an organism. In it we can distinguish two aspects: Moi and Soi. In “me” the subject appears as
such, as a bundle of sensations, and in the “self”, Soi, the subject appears as observed by others,
as socially determined. These constitute, respectively, the existential (individual) and social
(communal) aspects of the subject.

The Moi of the artist is the pure source of ideas. But we can also say that transcendence lives
within a man. The Moi, however, is surrounded by the sphere of the Soi, that part of the ego which
is social, coded and community-bound – not existential. Together they form the phenomenon that
Thomas Sebeok called “the semiotic self”. This concept coined by Sebeok is determined by the
physical and virtual body. Some identify the semiotic moment either with social codes (the
Saussurean tradition) or with the kinetic energy of the ego (Julia Kristeva). These theories also
have their supporters in musical semiotics.

My colleague in musical semiotics, Raymond Monelle, adheres to the first one when he says that the
semiotic appears particularly well in the socially codified forms of eighteenth-century music
(Monelle 1992: 5). The latter is exemplified by the “new musicolologist”, Richard Taruskin, who
speaks of the “semiotic” in Russian music; his description as such of the undulating gestures of
Polovetsian girls in Borodin is a typically Kristevan “semiotics” of music (Taruskin 1997: 152).

In my theory, both are necessary: they together form the Ich-Ton of an organism, which is
surrounded by the Other. Insofar as this Other is another subject-organism, one can presume that it
is construed in the same manner of Moi and Soi. Thus the point and surface in which one Ich-Ton
touches the Other (Dich-Ton) and its organism, is of course the sphere of Soi. Only on this level
does language function as a codified set of rules, which enables communication in the proper sense
between these organisms.

Above I asked whether one’s Moi can directly communicate with the Other’s Moi. The answer is:
mostly, no. Moi must first transform into Soi within one’s organism. I must become Me, in the sense
of G. H. Mead, before one subject reaches another one.

But correspondingly, if Sois were only communicating between themselves, we could never be sure if
what Others express, via gestures and words, really represents what they intend in their noemas.
Intention always covers both Moi and Soi.

The primus motor of art history is the becoming of Moi in relation to Soi; or rather, the constant
rebellion of the Moi against the communal, conventional world of the Soi. In sonata form, the
appearance of the Moi was at first permitted only during the development section, amidst harmonic
and motivic instability. Then Wagner elevated this principle, as “continuous transition”, into the
constructive principle of his operas, or their Soi. Later came the shift to atonality and
serialism, giving total dominance to the Soi. Yet even it was negated, since it is impossible to
repress completely the Moi. The sphere of Soi forms a perpetual resistance to the being of the Moi.
Correspondingly, the existence of Moi prevents communication from becoming the mere domain of the
Soi, a field comprised exclusively of langue.

Paradoxically, however, if the Moi is left to realize itself freely, the results are not a rich
tapestry of modalities, but their scarcity and suppression. In Nietzsche’s musical compositions,
the modalities of will, know and can do not develop into anything, since they do not take shape in
forms codified by the Soi. Only with such forms can one create a hierarchical, structured work.
Although Nietszche’s inner resolve was tremendous, and although he scatters German performance
indications everywhere, in his writings emphasizes the principle of will, and resorts to
extra-musical programs in Ermanarich and other works, his musical ‘will’ does not develop to its
climax, and neither does ‘know’ nor ‘can’. They lack the ‘must’ of the Soi. Modalities favored by
the Soi are precisely ‘must’, ‘know’, ‘can’ and ‘will’, in that order, in such a way that their
amount and cogency diminishes towards the end of the list. Conversely, the modalities of the Moi go
from heaviest to lightest: ‘will’, ‘can’, ‘know’, ‘must’.

Of the modalities of the Moi, ‘will’ is the most important; it conveys the inner pressure of
movement, the stability of the work. ’Will’ does not necessarily appear solely as ’want-to-do’, but
may manifest also as want-to-be or want-not-to-do or want-not-to-be (this holds true also for other
modalities). The second important modality for the Moi is ‘can’, or power (pouvoir), often even a
corporeally important category. Next most essential is ‘knowing’, which concerns the memory of the
Moi, a kind of “profound ego” (le moi profond) in the Bergsonian sense. The concept of
“intellectual effort” as it relates to Bergson (see Bankov 2000) is interesting since it seems to
be based upon the modality of ‘know’, and at the same time on ‘do’ and ‘can’. For instance, a
musical or literary composition delivers information only via an effort, not by itself. With the
help of the memory of the Moi, the composition, as an “organism”, remembers its earlier solutions
during its enunciation. Finally, even the Moi possesses its own inner obligation, its particular
‘must’ – one cannot go against the laws of Moi. Whoever does so, subdues his own expression.

In the modalities of the Soi, ‘must’ comes first, as normative forms and communication structures:
styles, techniques and topics (musical-rhetorical figures). If a writer calls his literary work a
“novel” or “comedy”, or if a composer designates his work as a sonata, symphony or fugue, then he
commits himself to a certain ‘must’ or obligation of the Soi. Second important is the modality of
‘know’ or the penetration of elements from the store of intonations (Eco would say, from the
encyclopedia of knowledge), which are transcendent to the work. For instance, the beginning of
Beethoven’s last piano sonata (Op. 111) displays not only the topics of Sturm und Drang, but also
the French ouverture of the Baroque era, with its dotted rhythms (see, e.g., the first movement of
Handel’s Suite in G minor). Therefore, when we say that the Ich-Ton of an art work determines which
elements it accepts from its surroundings, taking them into its organism and transforming them into
endosemiotic entities, what is involved is precisely the modality of ‘know’.

The third important modality for the Soi is ‘can’, understood as the adoption of certain techniques
and resources whereby the aforementioned ‘must’ and ‘know’ can be realized. Least important to the
Soi is ‘will’. Yet even it appears as a kind of collective wanting; for instance, when a composer
expresses the voice of his community, when a painter like Rubens praises his ruler Maria di Medici,
when Clara Schumann writes variations on the Emperor Hymn, or when Wagner writes Mastersingers in
the atmosphere of the Franco-Prussian War. The ‘will’ of the Soi is thus of collective origin.

These reflections can be put into the following model, which has three circles:

The diagram shows transcendence is filtered via Soi to the sphere of Moi.

Is the production of an art work mostly an affair of Moi or mostly of Soi? If one writes a fugue it
is an event of Soi, without doubt. If one provides it with a little tinge of expressivity, in the
line of Mozart-Beethoven-Franck-Brahms, it has a little bit of Moi as well. But if one writes a
fantasy or an aleatoric work, it is certainly more an activity of Moi. In literature, Charles
Mauron spoke about obsessive myths of a writer. In films by Kaurismäki or Renoir or Eisenstein we
see certain personal themes recurring and being elaborated. Yet Moi, left all to itself, is most
often helpless, a fact exemplified by musical improvisation. When the performer has full freedom in
performances, the probable results are outworn clichés and mannerisms: either as techniques
stemming directly from the unconscious of the Soi, or as such forms of the Moi which our subject
supposes the audience wants to hear. What is involved is the artistic das Man: man schreibt so, man
malt so, man komponiert so….

We can now put together the most important ideas of this essay. My intention was to specify, among
other things, the category of ‘being’, by providing this basic modality with new flavours from Kant
and Hegel, and by following the phases of this concept further, from Kierkegaard to Sartre and
Fontanille (of course, the project of existential semiotics need not stop here). When one aims for
more subtle tools in semiotics, one can still find radical innovations in the classics of
philosophy. The Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself became Being-in- and Being-for-myself in
existential semiotics. When these notions are combined on Greimas’s semiotic square of logical
oppositions, one gets the following cases:

They can be interpreted as follows:

1) Being-in-myself represents our bodily ego, which appears as kinetic energy, khora, desire,
gestures, intonations, Peirce’s First. Our ego is not yet in anyway conscious of itself but rests
in the naive Firstness of its being; modality: endotactic, ‘will’.

2) Being-for-myself corresponds to Kierkegaard’s attitude of an observer. Sartre’s negation
obtains, such that mere being shifts to transcendence; it notices the lack in its existence and
hence becomes aware of itself and transcendence. The mere being of the subject becomes existing.
This corresponds to the transcendental acts of my previous model, negation and affirmation. Ego
discovers its identity, reaches a certain kind of stability, permanent corporeality via habit;
modality: endotactic, ‘can’.

3) Being-in-itself is a transcendental category. It refers to norms, ideas and values, which are
purely conceptual and virtual, they are potentialities of a subject, which he can either actualize
or not. What is involved are abstract units and categories; modality: exotactic, ‘must’.

4) Being-for-itself means the aforementioned norms, ideas and values as realized by the conduct of
our subject in his Dasein. Those abstract entities appear here as applied values, choices and
realizations, which often will be far away from the originally 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 movement of the collective
Hegelian Spirit, but also the presence of a subject, via the addition of Being-in- and -for-myself.
Crucial is not only the distinction of these four logical cases, but also the movement among them,
the transformation of a chaotic corporeal ego into its identity, the becoming of ego into a sign to
itself; furthermore, the stable and completely responsible ego impacts the actualisation of
transcendental values, such that the ego becomes a sign to other subjects. In this phase, the
Being-in-myself and for-myself meets Others; i.e., you, or Being-in- and Being-for-yourself. Behind
this social field looms the realm of transcendental and virtual values and norms: signs which have
not yet become signs to anyone.

In the classical sense, the semiotic sphere consists only of the 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, properly speaking. These are totally “concrete” and “sensual”
qualities on the one hand, and on the other, they are entirely abstract, “intelligent” norms and
values (recalling Lévi-Strauss’s distinction into le sensible and l’intelligible). However, this
semiosis, the process of act-signs, cannot be understood without going outside of it, to
transcendence. Hence, in these two phases existential analysis becomes a Kantian, transcendental
analytic.

Ultimately we can formulate our semiotic square as follows:

Most recently I prefer to speak of two different directions or movements among coordinates of the
semiotic square portraying a subject’s mind. This movement goes from the concrete and corporeal
towards the abstract and “intelligible”: Moi gradually unfolds, developing a Soi, and reaching even
the most abstract categories of a society. In this development, the weight of Moi gradually
diminishes, of course, but a tiny trace of it remains in even the most extreme case of Soi. The
other direction starts from the Soi, with its norms and values, and leads towards their enactment
in certain institutions and practices, and their impact on an individual’s behaviour on a personal
level, reaching into the tiniest subtleties and nuances of his corporeality. For purposes of
analysis, let us call these moments Moi1, Moi2, Moi3 and Moi4, and correspondingly Soi1, Soi2, Soi3
and Soi4. We can easily see how in this model these two movements coincide. Both “streams” can have
their own particular signs, and the interesting and provocative point in this theory is the
encounter of these two types of signs:


Each phase of subjectivity appears to itself as specific and characteristic signs (endosigns, as we
called them earlier); whereas when the subject enters into activity and signifying action, he/she
produces again its own signs which are quite overt (exosigns). These two attitudes – observing
oneself and realizing oneself – correspond to two basic attitudes in Schelling’s system of
transcendental idealism: anschauen and handeln.

From postcolonial analysis to a theory of resistance

The new theory of existential semiotics, presented above in a nutshell, has two important venues
for application. First, for a theory of arts and culture we may sketch new ways of analysing
artistic texts of any nature: music, theater, film, painting, poetry, and more. The processual
character of the model enables us to employ it particularly for a theory of the performing aspects
of arts, that is to say, how signs are actualized from their pre- and virtual state into actsigns.

Second, the applications also cover the social field of values, communities, ideologies,
axiologies. I have already done two experiments in this direction in my essays on “Postcolonial
Analysis” and “A Theory of Resistance”. This aspect is important since it shows that the
existential theory has the capacity to account for the condition humaine in our globalized era –
and to do so in a responsible fashion. Existential semiotics is an epistemic theory, yet it
illuminates quite pragmatic problems of our own world. It comes close to what has been called
“semioethics” by some scholars (such as Augusto Ponzio, Susan Petrilli and John Deely). Looked at
another way, as Bulgarian semiotician Kristian Bankov has done, and with slight modifications,
existential semiotics is occupied with the “knowledge-based” and “value-based” society in which we
live, at least in Europe. What, then, are the central issues of these two fields of socially
oriented, existential semiotics?

In postcolonial semiotics we ponder a situation in which there are two subject positions: the
dominant and the dominated. My proposal started from my reading of anthologies on postcolonial
analysis in general, and mostly focusing on the typical cases of, say, the British Empire – India,
France – Algeria, Spain – Latin America, Portugal – Goa, Macao, etc. It was easy to notice,
however, that the postcolonial situation prevailed even within Europe itself, among its “central”
and ‘peripheral” countries. Ultimately, every nation has, inside its borders, certain minorities
which it colonizes. Many kinds of semiotic discoursive mechanisms are used to maintain such a
distinction. Yet they were all essentially based upon a rather simple theoretical scheme: the two
actantial roles, as said, of dominant and dominated; i.e., those retaining power and those
accepting it and subordinated to it. Moreover, concerning postcolonial discourses themselves one
needs only the old Saussurean notions of langue/parole and signifier/signified in order to explain
their functioning. The “grammar” is set by the dominant; the dominated are allowed to adopt and
apply it, sometimes even brilliantly, but they are not permitted to change it. If the dominated
want to communicate, they must accept what the dominant Soi dictates, as I would say now. Yet very
often even that is impossible, and the dominated are simply “silenced”, deprived of using their
voice in any audible or effective manner. Representatives of the periphery – those who are
dominated – are forbidden to speak out about their wishes and aspirations, neither in politics nor
in the arts. In the latter case, they are often presented as something “picturesque” and “exotic”,
which only strengthens the central/peripheral dichotomy. This kind of repression may occur in the
most innocent-looking ways, such as praising the national values and qualities of a composer,
writer, painter, movie maker, and so on. In fact, however, his real message is quite universal,
displaying Music, Poetry, Painting as such.

Still, the dominated do have the possibility to rebel, within the sign practices themselves,
letting their Moi emerge and break the norms, topics, and standards of the “official” grammar that
forces signifiers into preestablished, precodified forms. The signified (content) can be so new and
radically alien, but at the same time convincing, that it “explodes” the chains of the signified
and forces the destinatee to receive the message. This process is similar to what Roland Barthes
recommended long ago in his classical essay on the “fascism of language”, which we may resist by
“cheating” language in literature, which cares little about the rules of everyday communication.
The same was said even earlier by the Russian formalists, with their idea of ostranenie,
“estrangement”.

The relationship of colonialism and nationalism is also interesting since the latter very often
emerges as a reaction against the former, and hence relies upon its suppressive power. But it
depends very much upon whether we have to do with a benevolent nationalism conveying some new
quality, or an aggressive, repetitive, iconic nationalism with subordinating tendencies.

A theory of resistance likewise emerges from certain epistemic premisses, though even they are
closely linked to and motivated by certain social practices. Again, we are aiming for a more
“universal” theory to be applied in the most varied cases of “resistance” in our contemporary world
and society. In fact, typical of existential semiotics, which also includes an inbuilt semioethic
program, even a theory of resistance has two sides and two starting points. One the one hand, it
was launched by a criticism of certain forms of globalisation, which already have been much debated
by some intellectual semioticians. Existential semiotics does not just look at the world from a
distance but elaborates models and discourse whereby the subjects, living in their Daseins, could
improve their situation. Hence it shares with structuralism the aspiration to serve as a kind of
“social therapy”.

On the other hand, we need a theory that is challenging by its purely logical and intellectual
qualities, in order to intervene in the course of the world. Such a theory may open by reversing
the ordinary course of semiosis, which we normally think of as going from “left to right”, that is,
from sender to receiver. What if there were a countercurrent of signs? That is, what if the signs
were to go from right to left? This would require that we stop for a while, in the process of sign
production and emission, so as to reflect on categories such as Being, Memory and History. The
first mentioned is by itself central to existential semiotics, as we saw above in the varieties of
Being based on Hegelian logics. But it has also been treated richly by Umberto Eco in his comments
on Heidegger in his Kant e l’ornitorinco (1997). Moreover, Memory, in the sense of Henri Bergson in
his Matière et mémoire (1941), means that we compare the present, “now” moments in the temporal
course to the store of previous events in our memory. This eventually leads to a theory of
counterfactuals, i.e., pondering “what might have happened”. If, on its surface level, reality
consists of chains of events, there are alternatives which might have happened, which at a deeper
level constitute a network of possible but not-realized events. According to Georg Henrik von
Wright, we can imagine something as possible only if it has happened at least once earlier in
History – our third category – and only if we can remember it. Yet, the other, more “existential”
view would say that mankind has imagination and that we can figure out possible worlds creatively –
something that has never existed before, but which becomes a reality. Altogether, these three
mechanisms form the theoretical basis for resistance, in the term’s largest purport.

References

Bankov, Kristian 2000. Intellectual Effort and Linguistic Work: Semiotic and Hermeneutic Aspects of
the Philosophy of Bergson. Helsinki: International Semiotics Institute.

Bergson, Henri 1941. Matière et mémoire [Matter and Memory]. Paris: Presses Universitaires de
France.

Eco, Umberto 1990. Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

– 1997. Kant e l’ornitorinco [Kant and the Platypus]. Milano: Bompiani.

Inwood, Michael 1992. A Hegel Dictionary. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Kierkegaard, Søren 1846/1992. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press. Orig. Danish: Afsluttende uvidenskabelig Efterskrift.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude 1962. Pensée sauvage [Savage Mind]. Paris: Plon.

Monelle, Raymond 1992. Linguistics and Semiotics in Music. Philadelphia, PA: Harwood Academic
Publishers.


Sartre, Jean-Paul 1943. Être et le néant [Being and Nothingness]. Paris: Gallimard.

Taruskin, Richard 1997. Defining Russia Musically. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Uexküll, Jakob von 1940. Bedeutungslehre [Theory of Meaning]. Leipzig: J. A. Barth.