In: Semiotics Theory and Applications ISBN 978-1-61728-992-7
Editor: Steven C. Hamel © 2011 Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
Chapter 2
BEYOND SIGNIFICATION: THE CO-EVOLUTION OF
SUBJECT AND SEMIOSIS
Tahir Wood
University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South AfricaABSTRACT
The paper will start from the assumption that semiotics today has advanced well
beyond the early insights of Peirce and Saussure, both of whom looked at signs rather
atomistically and in a decontextualised manner. Furthermore these thinkers tended to
view the icon, index and symbol as different kinds of signs. Such views are untenable
today.
Firstly, it needs to be shown what the nature of contextualisation entails, as a shift
from signification to cognitive semiosis. This implies both intertextuality and
intersubjectivity as a result both of the evolution of the species and the further evolution
of its culture. Highly evolved culture is made up of a complex of implicit and explicit
intertextual relations, resulting in increasing levels of abstraction that demand
concretisation through the hermeneutic activity of a constantly transforming subjectivity.
This needs to be theorised so as to show up the nature of the symbolic order, which
nevertheless incorporates the iconic and indexical within itself. This incorporation means
that the iconic-indexical dynamics of zoosemiotics retain a presence within symbolic
human semiosis.
It will be shown that this insight is prefigured as the ̳animal kingdom of the spirit‘ in
Hegel‘s Phenomenology and that this raises the possibility of a more fully realised
symbolic realm in the further evolution of culture. This possibility flows from the fact
that human subjectivity may be expanded to a greater consciousness of the iconic-
indexical animality that is embedded in the symbolic order. This cannot mean an evasion
of the iconic-indexical realm but a greater awareness of it to be achieved through powers
of reflectivity.