38 Tahir Wood
1. INTRODUCTION
My intentions in this chapter are to define the nature of a research programme on the co-
evolution of subject and semiosis, to indicate those parts of the programme where certain
progress has been made in a number of disciplines and where reasonably confident statements
can be made, and finally to provide an imaginative construction of those areas that may be
ready to disclose themselves at some point in the future and which seem to beckon us towards
new research endeavours. My introductory remarks will be brief, with only a few
observations on the Peircean and Saussurean roots of semiotics, as well as some of the
limitations of the original semiotics associated with these thinkers. This means that much of
the last century or more of research and debate must be taken as one vast premise and even
certain topics that appear to touch on my own area of interest, for example the relationship
between post-structuralism and semiotics, must remain unexamined here. Those are topics for
another occasion.
What I would like to do is to proceed fairly directly, via a short overview of the field of
zoosemiotics, with particular reference to the work of René Thom, towards drawing certain
lines of continuity between the zoosemiotics of the animal kingdom and the symbolic realm
of human semiosis. From there I will proceed to a critical examination of the symbolic order
and especially of certain understandings associated with the notion of ̳unlimited semiosis‘. I
would like to draw particular attention to certain aporiae inherent in the development of
semiosis and to show how these are problematic for communication and for human agency in
general. In particular I draw attention to hermeneutic problems that derive from escalating
levels of abstraction in discourse processes, which may in fact have a natural limit, and I
attempt to show how this is implicated in the difficulties I have with unlimited semiosis and
the apparently infinite chain of interpretants that defines it.
This sets the scene for a historical treatment of subjectivity. It is shown that the symbolic
realm is not cut off from the iconic and indexical principles that define zoosemiotics. Using
an approach derived from Hegelian logic I show how it is that the distinction between symbol
on the one hand, and icon and index on the other, is also internal to the symbolic order itself.
By this means I am able to show, in a way that I believe to be fairly original, how it is that
animal semiotics are necessarily perpetuated within the human symbolic order. It is the
continuing domination of the iconic and indexical principles within the symbolic that can help
us to understand the shapes of subjectivity that have emerged historically.
So the fundamental point of departure remains with the iconic, indexical and symbolic
principles. This famous triad, which appears in Peirce, Saussure and virtually throughout the
semiotics literature, can no longer be understood as a taxonomy of three types of signs, as
originally suggested by Peirce.^1 On this we might agree with Eco (1976, p. 178), although
perhaps not for the reason that he provides. He says that ―no satisfactory definition can be
found for them in the present context‖, i.e. within his own theory of codes. Rather than
discarding this triad though, and the insights associated with it, we should rather understand
that it indicates three general aspects that a given sign might have. Thus I speak of a semiotic
triad, not a ―trichotomy‖ in the manner of Eco; the analogy that my choice is meant to
suggest is the triad of notes that together make up a basic musical chord. It will be shown that
in human semiosis these three aspects are invariably co-present, while in the semiotics
(^1) See ̳What is a sign?‘ (§3).