40 Tahir Wood
Among the many problems associated with this legacy is that it has left us with a chasm
in theory between two types of meaning, one which is radically decontextualised as an
individual sign, and one which is contextualised in a discourse, whether as a clause,
proposition, referring expression, speech act, intention, or whatever else might be involved in
situated concrete expression. But we should not have to accept the limitation created by such
a separation in semiotic theory and it is precisely an aim of this paper to show how it may be
bridged, not by a theory of codes, but rather by a cognitive-evolutionary semiotics.
This will require a certain depth of analysis, in which evolutionary concepts are taken for
granted to some extent and in which social or cultural evolution is similarly presupposed.
Such depth is found firstly in the evolutionary semiotics of René Thom, which provides us
with the framework for understanding the passage from zoosemiotics to human semiotics.
Further depth will then appear with borrowings from psychoanalysis and the philosophy of
the subject in order to show how it is that the symbolic order has been constituted as human
subjectivity.
2. THE ANIMAL KINGDOM AND THE SYMBOLIC REALM
2.1. Zoosemiotics
The iconic is that fundamental aspect of the sign whereby something is represented in an
entirely non-arbitrary manner. This includes such phenomena as the imprint in a plastic
medium, such as a footprint in the sand, or the reflection in a mirror. But in fact it also
includes the full range of phenomena of perception. Animal organisms have an inner
representation of their environment, for example a mapping of the surrounding territory.
Features of the environment are imprinted or reflected, so to speak, onto the perceptual
apparatus of the organism, either fleetingly or more enduringly as memory. This inner
representation cannot be arbitrary if the organism is to survive; it must of necessity be iconic
in nature, i.e. based on the principle of isomorphism, which is the essential aspect of the
―genesis of the image‖ (Thom, 1983, p. 262).
But not every image in the environment is particularly significant to the organism, or
pregnant, in Thom‘s terminology. Thus the image created by a reflection in water or an
imprint in the sand may not be endowed with meaning; only as an index does this become the
case. The index includes the iconic aspect within itself, but adds the aspect of significance
that is absent from the iconic on its own, which is precisely why we should be careful of
examining each of these aspects entirely separately in semiotics. The index is of
overwhelming importance in zoosemiotics. It is based on associations, some learned and
some innate, among the various objects of perception that are of interest to the organism,
especially those relating to potential prey, pasture, predator or mate. Certain objects obtain
their interest for the animal due to an association, for example the spoor, whether visual,
olfactory or auditory, which indicates the path of a pursued prey. Thom explains this
association by saying that the index ―is always an actant which is, or has been, in contact with
its object, if it is not actually part of it‖ (1983, p. 267).
Clearly then in the animal kingdom the iconic and the indexical form an inseparable dyad
in the production of signs, but also, as Thom (1983, p. 268) says, we can consider these as the