42 Tahir Wood
topographical forms in four-dimensional space-time, to the single dimension of the linear
utterance. Sebeok (1999) accounts for this in terms of a two-stage emergence:
... language emerged as an evolutionary adaptation over two million years ago, in the
guise of a mute semiotic modeling system – briefly a tool wherewith hominids analyze their
surroundings - and was thus present in Homo habilis and all successor species. Speech, the
paramount linear display of language in the vocal-auditory mode, appeared as a secondary
exaptation probably less than 100,000 years ago, the minimum time required to adjust a
species-specific mechanism for encoding sentences with a matching mechanism for decoding
and interpreting them in another brain. The fine-tuning process continues. (p. 92)The symbolic system par excellence is language. The challenge for us is to understand
how it is that symbolic resources, such as the vast resources of the world‘s languages,
simultaneously contain and depend upon the iconic and indexical aspects of signs and yet go
beyond these. This is a vast topic and the present paper cannot do much more than clarify its
nature, especially in showing how this ̳going beyond‘ constitutes precisely what we call
subjectivity. Surely we will see that the ongoing evolution of this subjective-semiotic
constellation has consequences that can be described as more profound than mere ―fine-
tuning‖.
How does the symbolic emerge out of the pre-symbolic, yet retain the pre-symbolic
moments as parts of itself? As Wildgen (1982, p. 20) puts it, ―these aspects are ordered
insofar as Index uses iconic principles and Symbol makes use of iconic and indexical
devices‖. So in hominisation the iconic and indexical are somehow taken up into a new
synthesis, the symbolic order. A distinguishing characteristic of this symbolic order, as we
will see, is the power of abstraction. A sign that does not go beyond the indexical principle is
relatively immediate and concrete, even though it may be learned and even arbitrary like the
sound of the bell to Pavlov‘s dogs. The bell here is not at all part of a modeling system, in the
sense of Sebeok, let alone being anything akin to speech. Sebeok (1999, p. 92) cites Thom as
saying that language arises to fulfill two needs, firstly realising the permanence of the ego,
and secondly as an expression of the regulatory mechanisms of the social group. It is indeed
tempting to see in this dualism a restatement of the modeling/speech distinction.
Now where Thom explains the emergence of the abstract as the merging of territorial
maps into one unified conception of space, thereby bringing about the unified ego in man, we
might go further and understand, more generally, how it is that powers of abstraction make
concepts, and hence the entire symbolic order possible. It is not just the fact that we can have
a general notion of space beyond the maps of distinct territorial spaces that is decisive for the
emergence of the symbolic, but rather that, analogously to this, we can generalise any and
every sort of phenomenon into a universal category.
In this process we see why it is that the signified, to use Saussure‘s term, must precede
the existence of a signifier: Salience and pregnance are preconditions for a sign to exist at all.
Where the symbol will be with its ̳arbitrary‘ signifier, object recognition and object
significance must already be. It is the emergence of a meaning which necessitates that a
signifier should become linked to it, rather than the other way round, and this emergence of a
meaning and its mental fastening to a signifier is the beginning of the process of abstraction
that defines the symbolic order. Take for example the case of little pieces of deep fried potato
that someone is starting to produce; their objective form is salient and their image is pregnant