Lost in the Cosmos

A Southern poet who has sex with his students
    (p) A homosexual poet who calls himself a “flaming fag”
    (q) A homosexual accountant who practices in the closet
    (r) A four-year-old child
    (s) A seven-year-old child
    (t) A twelve-year-old child
    (u) An Atlanta junior executive who fancies he looks like Tom Selleck, dresses Western, and frequents singles bars
    ( v ) A housewife who becomes fed up, walks out, and commits herself totally to NOW
    (w) A housewife who sticks out a bad marriage
    (x) A New Rochelle commuter who quits the rat race, buys a ketch, and sails for the Leeward Islands
    (y) A New York woman novelist who writes dirty books but is quite conventional in her behavior
    (z) A Southern woman novelist who writes conventional novels of manners and who fornicates at every opportunity
    (aa) A Texan
    (bb) A KGB apparatchik
    (cc) A white planter in Mississippi
    (dd) A black sharecropper in Mississippi
    (ee) A Fourth Degree Knight of Columbus
    (ff) None of the above, for reason of the fact that, whatever the impoverishing and enriching forces, it is impossible so to categorize an individual self—except possibly (r), and (bb), but even there, one cannot be sure. As anyone knows, a person chosen from any of the above classes may turn out against all expectations to be either a total loss as a person or that most remarkable of phenomena, an intact human self
    ( CHECK ONE OR MORE )

    * Semiotics might be defined broadly as the science which deals with signs and the use of them by creatures. Here it will be read more narrowly as the human use of signs. Other writers include animal communication by signals, a discipline which Sebeok calls zoo-semiotics. But even the narrow use may be too broad. There is this perennial danger which besets semiotics: what with man being preeminently the sign-using creature, and what with man using signs in everything that he does, semiotics runs the risk of being about everything and hence about nothing.
    At best a loose and inchoate discipline, semiotics is presently in such disarray that all sorts of people call themselves semioticists and come at the subject from six different directions. Accordingly, it seems advisable to define one’s terms—there is not even agreement about what the word sign means—and to identify one’s friends and foes.
    The friends in this case, or at least the writers to whom I am most indebted, are: Ernst Cassirer, for his vast study of the manifold ways in which man uses the symbol, in language, myth, and art, as his primary means of articulating reality; Charles S. Peirce, founder of the modern discipline of semiotics and the first to distinguish clearly between the “dyadic” behavior of stimulus-response sequences and the “triadic” character of symbol-use; Ferdinand de Saussure, another founding father of semiotics, for his fruitful analysis of
    the human sign as the union of the signifier (signifiant) and the signified ( signifié); Hans Werner, who systematically explored the process in which the signified is articulated within the form of the signifier; Susanne K. Langer, who, from the posture of behavioral science, clearly set forth the qualitative difference between animal’s use of signals and man’s use of symbols.
    * I am grateful for the important distinction, clearer in the German language and perhaps for this reason first arrived at by German thinkers, between Well and Umwelt, or, roughly, world and environment, e.g., von Uexkull’s Unwelt as, roughly, the significant environment within which an organism lives, and Heidegger’s Welt, the “world” into which the Dasein or self finds itself “thrown”; also, Eccles’ “World 3,” the public domain of signs and language within which man—uniquely, according to Eccles—lives.
    The foes? If there are foes, it is not because they have not made valuable contributions in their own disciplines, but because in this particular context, that of a semiotic of the self, they are either of no use or else hostile by their own declaration.
    The first is the honorable tradition of American behaviorism, once so influential, and latterday behaviorist semioticists like Charles Morris—honorable because of their rigorous attempt as good scientists to deal only with observables and so to bypass the ancient pitfalls of mind, soul, consciousness, and self which have bogged down psychologists for centuries. I start from the same place, looking at signs and the creatures which use them.
    My