Beyond Signification: The Co-Evolution of Subject and Semiosis 55of those?' and, consequently, 'should I therefore act in this way or in that way?' More
seriously, such thinking may come to pose the question of whether there are situations that
simply do not fit the received categories at all.
Historically and politically, subjective morality arises as an expanding form of
citizenship. It is expected that a citizen acts out of a sense of duty rather than as a result of
coercion. Morality is propagated; it is distributed throughout society. It applies to everyone
and in this sense everyone can be seen as equal. There is a certain liberation in this; insofar as
the individual is autonomous and formally equal to every other, he or she can go about in
society knowing the right things to do and to say in respect of the persons and things to be
encountered in social situations. The citizen, female as well as male, is freed to go out and to
buy and to sell within the security of the known and universally accepted moral law, since it
has its iconic reproduction within each individual. The room for subjective interpretation is
kept narrow, due to the very form of deontic prescription, the maxim. It is in these semiotic
aspects that one may discover the limits of subjective morality.
First it may be observed that representation is inseparable from the development of the
techniques of representation. Subjective morality is historically not separable from events
such as the invention of writing and then the printing press, for example. Because morality is
universally propagated, it requires a means of propagation, and it is the duty of the citizen to
partake in this dissemination of the moral law. An illustration of this emphasis on
representational technique is seen in the scribe who laboriously makes copies of the Bible, or
the Islamic hafiz who memorises the entire Qur‟an by heart. These are among the most
striking ways in which iconicity asserts its presence within the symbolic order.
But also in a less extreme manner than in such examples, subjective morality, as a form
of representation, depends on an internal model of the external world as a set of cognitively
modelled social situations and actions, which are brought into being by definition rather than
pure experience and which will at some point come into conflict with experience.^17 These
would be cognitive models that have been constructed in moral discourse and which resemble
typical situations insofar as these situations are imagined and projected within that discourse.
They are typically defined and divided up by categories of law, those that are permissible,
those that are prohibited, those that are obligatory, those that one should try to avoid, and so
forth: One imagines the good subject activating these models and regulating actions according
to the felicity of the fit between the encountered world and the subject‘s modeling of it. To be
sure this is a form of reflection, albeit a very simple form based firmly on the iconic principle.
On the other hand one acts wrongly by having an imperfect representation of the law or
by not acting in accordance with it; this is either a semiotic failing or a moral weakness on the
part of the individual.
But the world may simply fail to resemble the subject's modeling of it, and so this iconic
representation breaks down or loses its hold. Thus subjective morality is an inherently static
mode of thought, which is unable to match the dynamism of the real world. It fixes social
situations as static models, which have been derived at some time in the past, even though the
world is constantly changing into something else. The models become less and less
isomorphic with reality as time passes.
(^17) The abstract way in which this moral discourse proceeds is wonderfully shown up in Hegel‘s short essay ̳Who
thinks abstractly?‘