Introduction: What is sociosemiotics?*

PAUL COBLEY and ANTI RANDVIIR

What is sociosemiotics? It is not the easiest question to answer and anyresponse will necessarily be incomplete. However, the current specialissue of Semiotica attempts to address the question, partly derived froma groundbreaking panel of some of the world’s leading sociosemioticiansat the ISI conference in Imatra, Finland in 2001.

To begin with, it is not clear what the name of the object in question is.Is it ‘sociosemiotics’ or is it ‘social semiotics’? The former term tends tobe dominant in the European tradition although, ironically, it echoes thepredominantly Anglophone tradition (notwithstanding Gumperz, amongothers) of sociolinguistics. The latter tends to be associated with theAnglo-Australian, Hallidayan perspective in communication and signstudy, although not exclusively so. (One contributor to this special issueeven insists on ‘social semiotics’ as the key term because ‘sociosemiotics’is more closely associated with Greimas and Courtes’ idea of an isolatedand subjectivist semiotics.) Since one of the aims of this special issue is tobring together endeavors in the field from a number of locations, espe-cially those that are infrequently acknowledged in the Anglophone world,we have alighted on ‘sociosemiotics’ as our designation. It is possible thatthis will become the preferred designation. Certainly, it is a less unwieldyterm in the sense that one seldom hears reference to ‘social linguistics’(despite an occurrence of the term in one of the contributions in this spe-cial issue).

1. Defining sociosemiotics

Yet, the choice of a name is one of the least troubling aspects of under-standing what sociosemiotics is. Sociosemiotics clearly stands in relationto ‘semiotics,’ a term that is itself infrequently defined with any greatrigor. Furthermore, it also has a close relationship with di¤erent kinds of

Semiotica 173–1/4 (2009), 1–39 0037–1998/09/0173–0001DOI 10.1515/SEMI.2009.001 6 Walter de Gruyter

applied semiotics (cf. Pelc 1997) and their attempts to reconfigure signstudy as the appropriate means for closely studying the phenomena ofeveryday life. Among the very few explicit definitions of sociosemiotics isthat of Lagopoulos and Gottdiener who state, simply, that ‘sociosemi-otics is materialistic analysis of ideology in everyday life’ (Gottdienerand Lagopoulos 1986: 14). This definition, however, may be open to ac-cusations that it is ‘too materialistic’ in the sense that in semiotic analysisit is impossible to escape either from everyday life and the consummationof signs at the stage of data collection (see, for example, Danesi and Per-ron 1999: 293). Nor is it easy to escape from the necessarily pragmaticangle of semiotic studies (see, for example, Morris 1971: 43–54) in whichthe ‘context,’ embedded in sign use, should be an important guide tointerpretation. Stressing ideology may have also encouraged Gottdienerand Lagopoulos to distinguish sociosemiotics from so-called ‘mainstreamsemiotics’ by associating the former exclusively with the analysis of con-notative signification connected with ideological systems. Yet, one wouldbe hard-pressed to find a cultural phenomenon in which denotative as-pects were deprived of connotative codes.

Frequently, sociosemiotics is left undefined, despite the fact that itappears in the titles of numerous publications (e.g., Halliday 1978; Hodgeand Kress 1988; Alter 1991; Flynn 1991; Riggins 1994; Jensen 1995).Clearly, it must at least be a matter of a critical sign study that is awareof the specific and strategic ways in which signs are deployed in socialformations. The opposites of this definition are probably implicit: thatis, first, study of signs in nature (as if nature did not feature ‘sociality’)and sign study in social formations that is not aware of the specific/strategic deployment of signs (a straw man for some versions of socio-semiotics that deplore the supposed apolitical nature of some semiotics).In various ways, a good paradigm is provided by the evolution oflanguage study in the twentieth century, especially in relation to an-thropology. Influential here, but by no means watertight, has been theSapir-Whorf hypothesis. Along with his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf(1897–1941), the linguist Edward Sapir pursued the argument that, inbrief, the language one speaks influences the way one thinks. Concomi-tantly, the thought processes of one culture are separated from anotherby virtue of the language in which each ‘thinks’ and conceives the world.The idea was principally derived from the huge di¤erences Whorf per-ceived between European languages and Native American languages likeHopi (Whorf 1956). The idea of linguistic relativism (Gumperz andLevinson 1996; Lee 1996), in which language is seen to be responsiblefor many key cultural di¤erences, clearly chimes with social specific usesof signs.

2 P. Cobley and A. Randviir

Indirectly, then, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, influenced the develop-ment of sociolinguistics and, in turn, this influenced part of the develop-ment of sociosemiotics. Coupland and Jaworski’s list of sociolinguisticprinciples is illustrative of some of the imperatives that would be passedon to a full-blown sociosemiotics:

– How are forms of speech and patterns of communication distributedacross time and space?

– How do individuals and social groups define themselves in andthrough language?

– How do communities di¤er in the ‘ways of speaking’ they haveadopted?

– What are typical patterns in multilingual people’s use of languages?– How is language involved in social conflicts and tensions?– Do our attitudes to language reflect and perpetuate social divisions

and discrimination, and could a better understanding of language insociety alleviate those problems?

– Is there a sociolinguistic theory of language use?– What are the most e‰cient and defensible ways of collecting language

date?– What are the implications of qualitative and quantitative methods of

sociolinguistic research?– What are the relationships between researchers, ‘subjects,’ and data?

(Coupland and Jaworski 1997: 1–2)

As can be seen, the list not only identifies the interface of signs and the‘social,’ it also implicates methodology in the relationship. Furthermore,that methodology is itself a hybrid, derived from various disciplineswithin the human sciences.

Thus, if sociosemiotics is to be understood as a term — despite the factthat, even as a loosely recognized term, it is able to unite an array of for-midable scholars such as those in this special issue of Semiotica — it isworth mentioning what is involved in any attempt to outline its bounda-ries. To do this, it would be necessary to briefly consider the developmentof the humanities, especially as these converge, crisscross, and divergeduring the tense period at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centu-ries. In this perspective, special attention would have to be paid to (cul-tural) anthropology, semiology and semiotics, early sociology, and othersocial sciences. The first step, though, would involve an examination ofdi¤erent ‘subsemiotic trends’ in the context of the contemporary state ofsemiotics in order to distinguish the grounds for the (re)creation of a(new) field of sociosemiotics.

Introduction 3

2. The contemporary field of semiotics: A very brief note

There existed a relatively long period in the humanities of the twentiethcentury during which only two main authors were considered as thefounding fathers of semiotics and semiology: Charles S. Peirce and Ferdi-nand de Saussure. Locally, in areas such as Northern European andNorth American cultural studies, figures such as Barthes and representa-tives of poststructuralism were thought to represent contemporary semi-otics on their own. E¤ectively, though, Barthes was often made to standin for ‘Saussure’ or ‘semiotics’ (in truth, ‘semiology’). It is worth pausingbriefly to untangle these relations in respect of sociosemiotics.

First, the relation of semiology and semiotics has frequently beentreated as antagonistic. Singer compares semiotics and semiology in thefollowing manner:

Second, and more confusing still, as mentioned in relation to Barthes andcultural studies, semiotics has often been taken to be semiology, withoutany reference to the Peircean tradition. But the confusion of semiotics/semiology as conflated or antagonistic is further compounded in the caseof sociosemiotics. Saussure’s understanding of the sign, clearly evinced inthe Course in General Linguistics, is psychologistic, based on the unity of‘concept’ and ‘sound-image’ in the mind. Peirce, on the other hand, has amore materialist understanding of the sign as exemplified in the ‘object’component of his triad. For some anthropologically-oriented contributors

Table 1. Comparison of semiotics and semiology (Singer 1984: 42)

Point of Comparison Semiotic (Peirce) Semiology (Saussure)

1. Aims at a general theoryof signs

philosophical, normative,but observational

a descriptive, generalizedlinguistics

2. Frequent subject matterdomains

logic, mathematics,sciences, colloquialEnglish (logic-centered)

natural languages,literature, legends, myths(language-centered)

3. Signs are relations, not‘things’

a sign is a triadic relationof sign, object, andinterpretant

a sign is a dyadic relationbetween signifier andsignified

4. Linguistic signs are‘arbitrary’

but also include ‘naturalsigns’ — icons andindexes

but appear ‘necessary’ forspeakers of the language(Benveniste)

5. Ontology of ‘objects’ ofsigns

existence presupposed bysigns

not ‘given’ but determinedby the linguistic relations

6. Epistemology ofempirical ego or subject

included in semioticanalysis

presupposed by but notincluded in semiologicalanalysis

4 P. Cobley and A. Randviir

to the general field of sociosemiotics, this was potentially a boon. Put sim-ply, the sign could be demonstrated to have a clear e‰cacy in everydaylife and material culture. Yet, oddly enough, sociosemiotic investigationsstill managed to flourish as ‘materialist’ studies using the semiologicaltradition, often in blissful and hubristic ignorance of Peircean semiotics.Barthes’ highly influential primer on Saussure, translated into English in1967 as Elements of Semiology, re-presented the Saussurean signifiant as amaterial entity, a substance in the circulation of signs.

One important branch of sociosemiotics that relied on Barthesian semi-ology, among other things, was the Anglo-Australian tradition of ‘socialsemiotics.’ Drawing, too, on the work of Halliday, general sociolinguis-tics and, later, Foucault and contemporary studies of the media, this tra-dition gained enormous influence especially in Northern Europe, NorthAmerica, and Australasia, augmenting a burgeoning field of discoursetheory that includes a plethora of robust journals (Discourse and Society,Social Semiotics, Discourse Studies, etc.), subdivisions such as ‘critical dis-course analysis’ (CDA), and a defined career path for those who wish tomaster and reproduce the discourse theory register.

Yet, the separation and the conflation of semiotics/semiology are, atleast in one sense, misguided. Human signs and semiosis are located inthe mind, and concepts and sound-images are in connection, on the onehand, with sociocultural sign systems in terms of expression and, on theother hand, with either concrete or abstract referents, such that they arealways implicated in the semiotic reality of a community. The tension ofdi¤erent regimes of semiosis really arises from relations between sociocul-tural reality and institutionalized sign systems on the one hand, and theinternalized relations and individual applications of signs on the other.

Another major figure in semiotics, although aligned most closely withPeirce, has produced work that proposes to solve the problem of di¤erentregimes of semiosis and di¤erent realities. Thomas A. Sebeok’s career hasconsisted not just of his publishing and teaching ventures. His massiveproject of promoting disciplines and bringing together its representativesis well-known and well-documented. This included bringing togetherworkers in the field of Chomskyan linguistics and sociolinguistics, aswell as his work in convening biosemiotics and an impressive array of tex-tual semiotics. Semiotics as redefined by Sebeok drew from the exampleof Peirce and the reference points of John Locke. Peirce’s triadic versionof the sign, his typologies of sign functioning, and the design of his signtheory to cover all domains, provided the groundwork for Sebeok tomake his work amount to an outline of the way that semiosis is the crite-rial attribute of life (see Sebeok 2001; cf. Petrilli and Ponzio 2001). Semi-otics in this formulation was not just a method for understanding some

Introduction 5

artifacts of interest to arts and the humanities. Rather, it evolved as thehuman means to think of signs as signs, whether they be part of commu-nication in films or novels, the aggressive expressions of animals or themessages that pass between organisms as lowly as the humble cell. To besure, the communication that takes place in the sociopolitical sphere is ofutmost importance and the future of the planet currently depends on it.However, after Sebeok it is necessary to understand that human a¤airsare only a small part of what semiotics’ proper object is.

The biosemiotics encouraged by Sebeok draws on the work of theEstonian-born German theoretical biologist, Jakob von Uexkull. Mostimportantly, perhaps, von Uexkull’s work foregrounds the theory ofUmwelt: the ‘environment’ of species according to their specific modelingdevices. For Sebeok, the closest English version of Umwelt is ‘model,’a term that has been bestowed with specific resonance by the Tartu-Moscow School of semiotics. The modeling device of humans for usingsigns and apprehending their environment is what is understood as lan-guage, a primary capacity of which is nonverbal. As is well-known, Tartusemioticians were interested in the links between di¤erent levels of model-ing, particularly the level of ‘cultural’ modeling (‘tertiary’, see Sebeok1988), which was derived from the levels of verbal and nonverbal (‘sec-ondary’ and ‘primary’) modeling. Already, in this division of modelingsystems, there is the schematization of di¤erent kinds of semiosis and,possibly, the di¤erent semiotics needed to treat them. Hence, Sebeokencouraged specialism in semiotics: partly because he understood thatacademic endeavor has an aptitude for proceeding in this way, but alsobecause subsemiotic branches — one would include sociosemiotics amongthem — were crucial to the work of semiotics as a whole.

3. Subsemiotic branches

Yet, to complicate matters, subsemiotic branches of study have a longerprehistory than the theoretical formalization of modeling systems. Thus,the main way in which subsemiotic branches of research have emerged isthrough the logic of information channels (e.g., the optical channel; seeLandwehr 1997, the acoustic channel; see Strube and Lazarus 1997, thetactile channel; see Heuer 1997, etc.). Also terms like ‘visual semiotics,’‘semiotics of space,’ and the like, similarly point at the possibility of dif-ferentiating between objects on the basis of the channels of human per-ception by which the world is turned into signs. However, it is doubtfulthat these channels can be actually studied separately (see, for example,Krampen 1997). Furthermore, di¤erent areas of semiosis have been

6 P. Cobley and A. Randviir

articulated that lead to, and are included in, the cultural processes ofanthroposemiosis: microsemiosis, mycosemiosis, phytosemiosis, zoo-semiosis (see Wuketis 1997). So, the problem arises once more that socio-semiotics is always embedded in ‘general’ semiotics.

Jerzy Pelc (1997) attempts to address this question. According to Pelc,there exist more general levels of semiotics, such as frameworks andmetastructures, and applied semiotics that also includes the field of socio-semiotics (Pelc 1997: 636). Pelc’s argument follows the ideas of Morris(1946) in that ‘the application of semiotics as an instrument may be called‘‘applied semiotic’’ ’ and ‘applied semiotic utilizes knowledge about signsfor the accomplishment of various purposes’ (Pelc 1997: 636). Pelc statesthat ‘. . . one may also have in mind not only semiotic methods but alsodefinitions and statements contained in theoretical semiotics which thenbecome a common basis for various applied semiotics’ (Pelc 1997: 636).This again points at the impossibility of introducing di¤erent trends ofapplied semiotics without support from, and integration with, generaltheoretical semiotics. Likewise, it seems that there should always be aground for creating the above-named subsemiotic disciplines. Thus, itmay still be questionable to a degree whether the term ‘applied semiotics’can be used because of a necessarily strong link with the theoretical impe-tus (otherwise, the applications obtain such an ad hoc nature that theystart lacking common methods and principles). Pelc adds:

. . . each individual applied semiotics has its own theoretical foundations. Andsince some of the applied semiotics are humanistic disciplines (e.g. semiotics oftheater), others are social (e.g. sociosemiotics), still others natural (e.g., zoosemi-otics) or formal sciences (e.g., the study of deductive formalized systems), theirtheories too di¤er as regards methodology. (Pelc 1997: 636)

But, while Pelc’s understanding of the general and the subsemiotic disci-plines relies on attention to the intrinsically reflective nature of di¤erentsemiotic trends with regard to the general semiotic paradigm, he suggeststhat sociosemiotics is ‘to a great extent characterized by features typicalof theories in the social sciences’ (Pelc 1997: 639). As such, sociosemioticresearch includes the methods of all disciplines that allow the study of thedi¤erent levels of sign production and exchange as presented by Saussure(according to Bally and Sechehaye). These levels include psychological,physiological, and physical processes (Saussure 1959: 11–12), and linkup with Peirce’s discourse on logical and semiotic processes, as well asthe above-mentioned areas and channels of semiosis.

One area where levels and processes of interaction brought forwardin sign creation and exchange has been considered is in late twentieth-

Introduction 7

century communication study. The processual stages of sign exchange ascommunication have been articulated by those influenced by the classicalmodel of communication found in Shannon and Weaver (1949). Whilesuch processual models can principally be traced back to Saussure’ssketch of oral speech, other types of communication models center onthe functions of interaction as presented by Roman Jakobson (1960). Yetothers focus on perceptions and events (Gerbner 1956) or on particularoccupational communication (Westley and Maclean 1957). On numerousoccasions, Sebeok argued that semiotics in general and communicationtheory are the same thing. Certainly, as Dan Sperber argues, there weremany in the 1940s and 1950s who believed in and sought a unified scienceof communication based on semiotics, cybernetics and informationtheory (1979: 48). In light of this, it might be perceived that sociosemi-otics is the equivalent to a more sociologically-orientated communication,an approach that is subsemiotic (‘signs in society’) and whose methodol-ogy is defined by its objects (‘signs in society,’ again). There is sometruth in this; however, it is not the end of the matter since sociosemiotics’sources, influences, and correspondences are also located elsewhere thansociology.

4. Sources and correspondences

Apart from those areas mentioned already (notably, sociology, sociolin-guistics, and communication theory), it should be noted that sociosemi-otics has its sources and correspondences in the following areas: culturalanthropology (Kluckhohn 1961; Goodenough 1980 [1970]; Keesing 1972,1974; Rosaldo 1993 [1989]), cultural semiotics, (Shukman 1984; Randviir2004), sociology and the social sciences (Kavolis 1995; Nikolaenko 1983;Ruesch 1972), Marxism (Ponzio 1989; Rossi-Landi 1986a, 1986b, 1990),pragmatics (Verschueren 1999; Davis 1991; Morris 1938), pragmaticism(EP 2: 2.371–2.397; cf. Schutz 1967 [1932] and Garfinkel 1967), as wellas constructionism (see Gergen and Gergen 2003; Gergen 1985; Potterand Wetherell 1987) and the linguistic turn (Rorty 1967). A few wordson each may help in the definition of contemporary sociosemiotics.

4.1. Cultural anthropology

In attempting to define the content of ‘culture’ for contemporary semioticanalysis, it is di‰cult to avoid commenting on the development of cul-tural anthropology during the twentieth century. The expanding range of

8 P. Cobley and A. Randviir

cultural anthropology is related to the way in which sociosemiotics (aswell as mid-twentieth century semiotics, generally) found its objects. Eu-ropean cultural anthropology had roots in early sociology and Saussur-ean semiology that are revealed in structural anthropology. Furthermore,principles of semiology, structuralism, and formalism are evident in theparallel development of cultural semiotics. Semiology is important bothfor structural anthropology (cf. Leach 1976) and for cultural semiotics(cf. Lucid 1997), since it has directed culture studies toward the analysisof sign systems as cognitive social systems. A gradually increasing empha-sis on the description of cultural phenomena as the outcome of individu-ally (or communally) articulated social sign systems led to the burgeoningcurrency of schools in cultural analysis associated with cognitive trends incultural anthropology. Thus, there was a steady movement from the latenineteenth century description of cultures as sets of artifacts organizedaccording to cultural patterns toward the interpretation of cultures asideational systems (Geertz 1993). This means that cultures were no longerunderstood to be ‘made’ only at the meta-level, through the organizationof relations between cultural phenomena in scientific discourse. Indeed,while cultures could be viewed as ‘theories’ in Kluckhohn’s sense (Kluck-hohn 1961), throughout the development of the humanities there has beenan increased attention to cultures as abstractions existing at the level ofthe cultural object. This has been characteristic of schools analyzing cul-tures as ideational or semiotic systems.

Sociocultural systems are reflective systems and the overt behavior re-vealed in cultural traits depends on the covert behavior directed by cogni-tive structures such as image schemata, values, behavioral schemes, etc.Thus, the aim of understanding cultures has been to describe them assystems of knowledge, intersemiotic sign systems, reflective systems. Inthe fashion of the cognitive anthropologist Ward Goodenough, culturescan be seen as sets of decision standards, intellectual forms, perceptionmodels, models of relating, interpretation models, preference ratings andorganizational patterns (see, for example, Goodenough 1961, 1980 [1970],1981 [1971]). For a unified cultural anthropology, these cognitive struc-tures would converge into sociocultural systems defined as systems that‘. . . represent the social realizations or enactments of ideational designs-for-living in particular environments’ (Keesing 1974: 82).

An important feature of the development of the humanities has beenthe widening of the scope of culture study by new methods, a processthat is not unconnected to the development of semiotics. Rosaldopresents an understanding of the development of ethnographic and socialthought as having its roots in the epoch of ‘the Lone Ethnographer’deeply immersed in fieldwork, the results of which were used by armchair

Introduction 9

theorists as information storehouses. The period of the Lone Ethnogra-pher, according to Rosaldo, was followed by the classic period lasting inanthropology, from approximately 1921 to 1971; this was characterizedby the objectivist research program, which viewed society as a systemand culture as a coherent set of patterns: ‘Phenomena that could not beregarded as systems or patterns appeared to be unanalyzable; they wereregarded as exceptions, ambiguities, or irregularities’ (Rosaldo 1993[1989]: 32). Similarly, as Kluckhohn pointed out, the sudden expansionof the range of objects for culture analysis took place in tandem with thearrival of new methods allowing explanations of diverse phenomena sup-posedly outside the mainstream domain of culture, e.g., psychoanalysis(Kluckhohn 1961).

On the other hand, categorization of certain phenomena as not repre-sentative of a cultural system would principally allow descriptions ofgiven systems by way of a principle of negation. This is not dissimilar tothe predilection of both psychoanalysis and poststructuralism for the‘marginal’ as a repository of meaning by which to understand the main-stream. From this perspective, exceptions, ambiguities, and irregularitiesgain specific significance for the analysis of both the object-level (the so-called ‘wastebasket method’) and the meta-level. Discussions in culturalanthropology about the range of objects for the study of culture and soci-ety have been of great value for the social and human sciences. Whereasone can find fault in Western scholarship for its ‘primitivization’ of cer-tain cultures and societies until at least the turn of the nineteenth andtwentieth century, extending the range of research objects was of crucialimportance in placing Western cultures and societies under the anthropo-logical microscope. In a critical vein, Marcus and Fischer (1986: 20) havelabeled this the ‘salvage motif ’ of ethnography.

Until the beginning of the twentieth century, indigenous cultures weretaken as research objects for Western humanitarian scholarship. So-called‘primitive’ cultures tended to be described as cultural groups rather thansocieties. The Western population that lived in societies was deemed, atthe same time, too elaborate to study. Complex developments in Westerncivilization at the object-level (industrialization, inventions, and discov-eries that brought technology, medicine, natural science to levels that in-spired confidence — modernity) induced new attitudes at the meta-level:society became a proper object of study alongside culture. Yet, more far-reaching still has been the self-reflexivity of anthropologists later in thetwentieth century (e.g. Cli¤ord 1988; Marcus and Fischer 1986). Whatbecame apparent to cultural anthropology was not only that the phenom-ena studied in culture are semiotic in their bearing, but so too was the wayin which investigation of such phenomena took place, by partaking of

10 P. Cobley and A. Randviir

procedures that were as equally semiotic (or, in a more limiting way, dis-cursive) as the phenomena under question:

The primary data of ethnographic analysis consist of informants’ statementsabout the code and records of their speech behavior . . . All available data, includ-ing behavioral records, the ethnographer’s intuitions/and speech behavior, pro-vide evidence from which an underlying cultural code can be inferred, and againstwhich descriptions can be tested. (Keesing 1972: 301)

What anthropology came to realize, partly influenced by sociosemiotically-oriented ethnographers such as Hymes, was that it was dealing not somuch with the subject and object, but with the triplet of object, re-searcher, and informant. This has been a pretty salient point within theperspective of sociosemiotics.

4.2. Cultural semiotics

While Western cultural anthropology widened its objects of analysis andadopted a more interpretative bent, sociosemiotics also drew inspirationfrom work carried out in more constricting circumstances. Indeed, itmay have been such circumstances that prevented cultural semiotics asdeveloped by the Tartu-Moscow school from being overly transparent,despite the clarity and breadth of its principle theses (Ivanov et al. 1973).What is central, however, is the conceptual floating of the elementarynotions of metalanguage (see Levchenko and Salupere 1999). Culturalsemiotics as a discipline developed in the context of a totalitarian regime,also involving other, explicitly political spheres. Under totalitarian con-ditions it was largely impossible to present the kind of breadth to ap-proaching research objects that might have been achieved in less con-straining regimes. Whereas it might be possible to openly promotephilology or literature studies, it was simply not possible to promulgatesemiotics as an individual field of scholarship with an identifiable struc-ture and featuring the usual academic paraphernalia such as researchprojects, monographs, and textbooks. Any monolithic semiotic paradigmhaving to do with the analysis of society and culture would sooneror later have to get involved in the examination of power and ideology,social and cultural structure, and political developments. Scholarship viaarticles (as in the case of Sign Systems Studies, the oldest journal of semi-otics in the world) was fruitful but prevented the development of a unifiedmetalanguage even by members of the same school of scholarship. Of

Introduction 11

course, this is not uncharacteristic of textbooks and anthologies in dif-ferent disciplines that have developed in free societies and in the traditionof long-term institutionalization (e.g., psychology, sociology). Yet, inthose cases, variation at least worked within a certain established frame-work; adjustments and innovations served to make the paradigmatic andmethodological boundaries of a discipline continuous more exact. Thecircumstances of cultural semiotics’ gestation forced it to be wary of so-cial and political structures when it might have been self-reflexively defin-ing its parameters and methodologies (see, for example, Cherednichenko2000).

Problems in terminology and methodology that concern the definitionand study of cultural phenomena under the label of cultural semiotics are,on the other hand, related not only to the unfavorable political environ-ment in which the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school was to operate, but alsoto the relatively complicated and rapid development of the social sciencesand humanities in general. The evolution of cultural semiotics representsan interesting dynamism in which multiple scholarly traditions were in-volved. Distinctions can be made between the several predecessors of cul-tural semiotics according to certain political, geographic, and possiblyalso linguistic factors. There is an added complexity to the case, of course,in that the representatives of cultural semiotics were largely isolated fromtrends in scholarship that directly pertained to their study at the objectand meta-levels (e.g., Western cultural studies, cultural anthropology,etc.). Thus, ‘structuralism’ in relation to the Tartu-Moscow school cannotbe really considered on the same terms as, say, the French tradition. Nev-ertheless, French structuralism, Tartu-Moscow cultural semiotics, and(American) cultural anthropology, could be said to be at least analogousin their ideals and range of objects, and prefigure the principle method-ological standpoints of sociosemiotics. The main importance (if notappeal) of cultural semiotics probably consists of individual notions andconcepts that can be used to describe semiotic systems, while, at thesame time, the multiplication of these ideas sometimes renders culturalsemiotics confusingly diverse. It features descriptive concepts familiar tomost of sociosemiotics, such as textuality, intertextuality, code, secondarymodeling systems, and so forth; but it lacks a consistent, unified method-ology for the study of sociocultural phenomena. One problem whichseems to have prevented cultural semiotics from metamorphosing into afully-fledged sociosemiotics is the generality of its objects of analysis(e.g., ‘semiosphere’; cf. Randviir 2004: 67–70). Sociosemiotic studies —particularly the successful ones — have seemed to benefit from their insis-tence on specificity of objects, a quality shared with disciplines within thesocial sciences.

12 P. Cobley and A. Randviir

4.3. Sociology, the social sciences, and social psychology

As with cultural anthropology, the seemingly straightforward discoverythat humans are semiotic beings has had a profound impact on the wholetopic of empiricism in all walks of scholarship. The interpersonal and so-cial nature of signs in culture and the communicatively competent logicalprocedures applied to their syntagmatic organization now goes withoutsaying. The classificatory study of signs is now e¤ectively untenable.However, the ‘rate of empiricism’ in the social and human sciences, andin all scholarship eventually, has to do with the relation of humans, theirsociocultural reality and the so-called reality ‘out there.’ If human semi-otic systems filter human semiotic reality in communication, then humancognition is, to a large extent, defined through language and language-based sign systems. If the human’s perceptual abilities have been shapedby those very systems, then, what is called ‘reality’ is always inevitablymediated and arbitrated.

This does not lie at odds with the biosemiotic paradigm convened bySebeok, by way of von Uexkull, in which the human Umwelt consists ofthe unique combination of verbality and nonverbality. Yet, the realiza-tion of the semiotic determination of the human relation to ‘reality’ ispart and parcel of a pragmaticist understanding that has penetrated intovarious fields from linguistics to sociology. Indeed, it has altered the posi-tion of several disciplines in their relation to ‘objectivity’ (in the sense ofempirical study of ‘reality’). What is empirical in the characterization ofthe human and his/her sociocultural environment can be analyzed interms of semiotics and other disciplines studying sign systems. The samegoes for the investigation into the reality surrounding human beings asunique in their social essence. Thus, the disciplines commonly regardedas ‘hard’ or devoted to the research of the physical and chemical featuresof the Earth gain the position of being speculative, if not hypothetical.They attempt to characterize the human and his/her reflective abilitiesrather than those structures and phenomena that cannot be switched intothe chain of communication (cf. Russell 1948: ch. 3 and 7). Mead secondsthis: ‘The whole tendency of the natural sciences, as exhibited especiallyin physics and chemistry, is to replace the objects of immediate experienceby hypothetical objects which lie beyond the range of possible experience’(Mead 1938: 291).

From this standpoint, then, the social sciences — and semiotics, espe-cially, if it is, through sociosemiotics, placed within the social sciences —must be seen as the empirical paradigm par excellence. Its objects andits empiricism are rooted in the mediatedness of physical and socio-cultural reality and, while studying the mediation of these realms in

Introduction 13

communication, such study does go as far as possible in its search for‘objective empirical reality.’ The context-sensitivity of sociocultural phe-nomena on the one hand, and the very same complementarity in the or-ganization of semiotics on the other, point at the need of understandingsocial and cultural entities in terms of processes and functions that varyin space and time. In the era of striving towards a ‘unified science,’ thisawareness was made explicit in works by numerous eminent scholarswho are nowadays considered as the founding fathers of quite diverse dis-ciplines that they would not have identified themselves. Instead, they dealtwith sociocultural topics and phenomena as such without any disciplinaryrestrictions. The above-mentioned connections between disciplines suchas sociology, semiotics, psychology, anthropology are not coincidental.

Similarly, the social sciences have come to recognize and develop manyof the pragmatic/semiotic principles inherent in these disciplines at theirinception. The first fifty years of the twentieth century witnessed thegrowth of pragmatism (and pragmaticism) within several disciplines; assuch, traces of semiotics and its vocabulary can be identified in the major-ity of contemporary paradigms studying culture and society. At the sametime, though, the acceptance of the social nature of sign systems, and thepragmatic dimension of semiotics along with the semantic and syntacticaspects of study, is sometimes lost in the focus on ‘objects.’ The compre-hension of society and culture in terms of processes has often beenreplaced by a stress on structures. In this respect, it is unfortunate thatcontemporary semiotics is repeatedly associated with structuralism, a‘false consciousness’ that dissipates with a more informed return tothe sources of semiotics, especially pragmatic aspects of research. The‘socio-’ as a prefix in the comprehension of some practices of ‘semiotics’may serve the purpose of returning to the sources. Although there areclearly sign systems in nature, all sign systems recognized as such aresocial, all ‘texts’ are created in a social context, their sociality bound tophysical or semiotic subjects by virtue of the fact that it is humans whoare researchers.

Therefore, and taking into account that no propositions have beenmade for ‘semiotics of society,’ arguably there seems to be no utility inthe term ‘social semiotics’ — at most, this expression is simply tautologi-cal and hence of no heuristic value. ‘Sociosemiotics,’ on the other hand,implies sociality, but must simultaneously entail reference to the prag-matic aspect of semiotic studies that orients semiotics to the socialsciences (and e¤ects methodological control as one of its most importantfacets). On the other hand, the sociality of semiotics indicates the role ofsociosemiotics as a metadiscipline in the sense that sociosemiotics canserve as a methodological toolkit enabling researchers to outline the

14 P. Cobley and A. Randviir

boundaries of any study of sociocultural phenomena and sign systems.The fact that ‘social behavior’ or ‘sign systems’ can be and are metaphor-ically found in extremely wide areas concerning both living and inorganicsystems, does not–from the viewpoint of sociosemiotics–guarantee theirsemiotic essence or features. The scientific analysis of social behavior‘. . . must survive direct tests, if practicable, or any tests of derived propo-sitions no matter what their domain’ (Nicholson 1983: 79). The recent ex-tension of semiotic vocabulary to the whole biosphere has been fruitfulbut not without risk: namely, the animation and anthropomorphizationof species and phenomena that are ultimately outside the scope of humanunderstanding and frequently outside the parameters of testing in termssemiotically and communicationally graspable by the perceptive and cog-nitive powers of homo sapiens.

Even within the limits of human societies, metaphorical extrapolationsare fraught with danger:

There are . . . important homologies between the personality and the social system.But these are homologies, not a macrocosm-microcosm relationship — the dis-tinction is fundamental. Indeed, failure to take account of these considerationshas lain at the basis of much of the theoretical di‰culty of social psychology,especially where it has attempted to ‘extrapolate’ from the psychology of theindividual to the motivational interpretation of mass phenomena, or converselyhas postulated a ‘group mind.’ (Parsons 1952: 18)

Individual behavior cannot be explained by the extrapolation of truths per-taining to social psychology; likewise neither can societies nor social groupsbe described in the generalized terms of individual characteristics and be-havioral regularities. Society is not a ‘giant human,’ human beings are not‘small societies.’ On the other hand, the sociality of semiotics is derivedfrom the very definition of the sign (as the object of any semiotic study),and represents the caution to be borne in mind in the study of ‘reality.’

While pragmatic and semiotic principles constituted the social sciencesfrom the outset, philology, conversely, pronounced its sociality. Saussurepositioned the study of language alongside social psychology. Thus, it isno coincidence that the study of language, having been associated withthe study of speech (e.g., Austin 1961), had to conclusively embed itselfin the study of sign systems in sociocultural contexts. The study ofsociocultural environments and institutions, on the other hand, has beenbound — with fluctuations — to the analysis of language and speech(from Vygotskian to Bakhtinian perspectives). The realities in which hu-mans live are socially, culturally, linguistically constructed, and are funda-mentally semiotic. This deceptively simplistic proposition has generatedcomplex studies, inter- and transdisciplinary, involving the improbable

Introduction 15

task of clustering individual scholars according to specific areas of study,along with the di‰culties inherent in drawing disciplinary boundaries (tomention just a very few: Berger and Luckmann 1972 [1966]; Grace 1987;Wertsch 1991; Searle 1995; see, also, Gergen and Gergen 2003).

Understanding human environments as (semiotically) constructed, orat least accessible via signs, has lead to a common conception of the‘whole’ of research objects. While the expressions used for the holisticweb of mutually dependent and connected objects of study are oftenpretty diverse, they represent very similar treatments of humans, culture,and society. Consider ‘social world’ (Schutz 1967 [1932]), ‘social system’(Parsons 1952), ‘culture’ (Kluckhohn 1961), Lebenswelt (Garfinkel 1967),‘semiosphere’ (Lotman 1984), ‘mundane reason’ (Pollner 1987), ‘semioticreality’ (Merrell 1992), even the ‘semiotic self ’ (Wiley 1994) or ‘signifyingorder’ (Danesi 1998). These notions indicate that despite the disintegra-tion of the social and human sciences into diverse ‘individual disciplines’that happened alongside socio- and geo-political developments attendanton the end of World War II, the study of ‘social structure(s)’ always tendsto be ‘functional’ in one sense. In the discussion above, certain types ofobjects (gender, media, etc.) frequently associated with ‘sociosemiotics’were mentioned. The features of the analysis of culture and society out-lined here suggest that, through the process of socialization, social struc-tures become functional in respect to the meta-level. Ideological fluctua-tions that spotlight certain developments in society and culture (e.g.,feminism, the emergence of transvestism, actualization of (in)di¤erencesbetween races, social groups, sex-roles, etc.), can — and have — lead toinsular fields of research. The sociosemiotic understanding of the study ofculture and society, however, calls for the holistic complex perspectivethat some scholars have striven for in the last hundred years.

4.4. Marxism

In contrast to the Tartu-Moscow school of cultural semiotics whereMarxism was not too flavorsome an adoption for a semiotic discourse, itis well-known that Marxist ideas have been quite popularly ‘semiotized’in Continental and even in Anglo-American semiotic circles (some of themost well-known include Lefebvre 1968 [1939], Althusser 1975; and, themost explicitly semiotic in orientation and knowledge, Rossi-Landi 1990[1982]; see, also, Posner 1988 and Ponzio 1989). Semiotized Marxism hassometimes been studied as ‘structural’ Marxism (e.g., Benton 1984); it hasalso been associated with the analysis of dynamism between culture andsociety as holistic units, and labeled as belonging to the social systemic

16 P. Cobley and A. Randviir

approach to culture in cultural sociology (see Kavolis 1995: 4–6). Ofcourse, it is not di‰cult to discern meaningfulness in any system of (hu-man) communication, be it communication accomplished by immaterialor material sign-vehicles. The semiotic nature of material phenomena isevident in communication systems in Marxist terms, but just as well inanthropological analysis or in the study of material culture (for example,early study of the Kula ring, Mauss 1969; Malinowski 1999 [1922]). It isalso detectable in any material phenomena forming the context for com-munication and everyday life (see, for example, Riggins 1994). Further-more, the material environment that both forms and is being formed bysociality does follow a certain logic that is grounded in semiotic consid-erations (see, for example, Gottdiener 1985; Hillier and Hanson 1993[1984]; Lefebvre 1991 [1974]).

Rossi-Landi asserts that ‘Karl Marx made a remarkable contributionto the study of symbolism in general and to the theory of social commu-nication’ although he qualifies this by adding that ‘he made it in a mostindirect way’ (Rossi-Landi 1986a: 482; cf. Ponzio 2001). Too mechanistica relation between Marxism and semiotics presents fairly obvious perils.In particular, it might promote a search for the true meanings behind theappearances, the return of the Era of the Lone Ethnographer (Rosaldo1993 [1989]: 32) and so-called armchair scholarship. Such work has hadits influence, indeed an enormous one. Identified chiefly with the ‘mythcriticism’ of Roland Barthes, designed to expose the naturalizing influ-ence of bourgeois culture (with connotation being the foremost bourgeoisweapon), this perspective still has a hold in areas where internationalsemiotics is insu‰ciently well-known. Such a hold has been superseded;indeed, Barthes’ Mythologies (1973), with its undermining of the tenetsof 1950s French cultural artifacts, was e¤ectively laid to rest by Barthesin 1971 when he lamented how facile ‘myth criticism’ had become in theintervening years, calling, instead, for a more comprehensive ‘semio-clasm’ (1977). Notwithstanding this, Barthes’ semiotized Marxism is stillwidely taught and Mythologies remains a popular paperback book. Thisis largely because it is undeniable that signs do have connotations andthat they are enforced connotations. But, as with structuralism, the‘actual meanings’ revealed in work from this perspective are invariablyjust as arbitrary as those enforced by bourgeois culture.

Semiotized Marxism’s main problem has been its instrumental vision.Sign systems cannot operate through some clear-cut and unambiguouslyexplicable rules or grammars. Moreover, this is not in direct causal rela-tionship with the ways governments, political orders, and social institu-tions are willing to manipulate their citizens. Nor can the functioning ofsign systems be altered rapidly and neither can ideologies run at the same

Introduction 17

pace as semiotic systems (for example, Soviet Russia, even as an ideologyin power was forced to co-habit with traditional semiotic/ideological sys-tems: Russian orthodoxy and Tsarism continued to exist in lieu of theenforcing of a ‘proper’ Soviet discourse geared to balancing denotativeand connotative codes). Nevertheless, in the first instance, semiotizedMarxism has informed sociosemiotics by being forthright in drawing at-tention to the existence of a very strong relation of ideology and culture,even though that relation is not quite as it first seemed.

There is another major bequest from semiotized Marxism to sociosemi-otics. This is the argument that all sign systems are, in one way or an-other, material. Levi-Strauss’s (1968) treatment of homologies betweensettlement space, social structure, cooking, and worldview constitutes anearly example of both the close relation of ideology and culture plus themateriality of sign systems. To some extent, this kind of reasoning hascemented the relation of structuralism with the study of symbolic dis-course in the Marxist sense, in turn giving an impression of the proximityof semiotics and Marxism (for example, De George and De George 1972;cf. ‘materialistic semiotics’ in Rossi-Landi 1986b, Ponzio 1989: 394–396,cf. Heim 1983). Sign systems (if not the individual sign) can be under-stood as material even in Saussure’s division of the sign process into threelevels: psychological, physiological, and physical (Saussure 1959: 11–15).Sign systems are often materialized in normative and/or descriptivegrammars; this is not unconnected to the understanding of sign systemsas formal or informal institutions (cf. Ruesch 1972: 277–298). Anotherimportant area concerning the materiality of signs has rather to do withneuropsychology, an insu‰ciently explored domain in semiotics. Ideas as-sociated with memory traces, synaptic transfer, and the like, up to cere-bral dynamism (also on the sociocultural level), apparently have directconnection with sign processes in terms of Peirce’s category of Firstness(cf, however, e.g., Lotman 1983; Nikolaenko 1983; Jorna 1990; Davtianand Chernigovskaya 2003).

Apart from the possibility of discussing the materiality of the neurons,‘materialistic semiotics’ shares most of the principles of sociosemioticsthat have been discussed above. Rossi-Landi sums the matter up con-cisely, although he introduces another problem:

The program, then, is that of a semiotics founded on social reality, on the actualways in which members of the human race interact among themselves and withthe rest of the living and inanimate world. Such an approach cannot examinesign systems apart from the other social processes with which they are functioningall along. It cannot make everything rest on signs by themselves. (Rossi-Landi1986b: 486)

18 P. Cobley and A. Randviir

This o¤ers a seductive definition of sociosemiotics as a matter of analyz-ing signs (possibly seemingly trivial ones such as those attached to toysfor infants or those in arithmetical textbooks) and revealing their em-beddedness in relations to ‘non-signs’ (inescapably important forces suchas the relations of production and the exercise of power through institu-tions). This would be a good working rule to allow the conclusion thatsociosemiotics is simply semiotized Marxism, were it not for the simplefact that the relation of signs to non-signs always already renders the lat-ter as signs. Sociosemiotics, then, is not merely the study of the relation ofsigns to non-signs, nor is it sign study plus context.

4.5. Pragmatics

The ‘relation to’ context in sociosemiotics is more a matter of its prag-matic heritage, especially the initial division of linguistics made by oneof semiotics’ key conveners. The semiotician Charles Morris, in an influ-ential formulation, suggested that the study of language could be splitinto syntactics (the study of the relation of signs to other signs), semantics(the study of the relationships of signs to their objects), and pragmatics(the study of the relationships of signs to their interpreters or users) (Mor-ris 1938). Taking the third of these, the project of pragmatics has fre-quently been thought to be devoted to series of topics or categories inlinguistics such as propositions and ‘principles’ in speech, interactive im-plicatures, deixis, politeness, speaker roles, ‘speech acts,’ and ‘context.’Many of these interests overlap with sociolinguistics and for some prag-matics is a part of sociolinguistics in the same way as discourse analysisor CDA are (e.g., Coupland and Jaworski 2001). Verschueren (1999,2001) argues that pragmatics appears to have no real object of studyand that, in truth, it is more sensible to treat it as a ‘perspective.’ Whatthis perspective focuses on, for Verschueren, is choice, variation, andadaptation, a set of phenomena that actually allies pragmatics to Anglo-Australian sociosemiotics in particular, especially in respect of the latter’ssystemic-functionalist heritage. What Verschueren calls for, then, is anunderstanding of pragmatics as an interdisciplinary perspective compris-ing the study of cognition, society, and culture.

Following Verschueren’s argument, then, one could say that the per-spective of pragmatics su¤uses sociosemiotics in the same way in whichit has been present in, and since the inception of, the social sciences. In-deed, one could argue this is what positions semiotics among the socialsciences. Sociosemiotics is not so much a matter of signs plus non-signs,then; nor is it a matter of signs plus context. Rather, its principles and

Introduction 19

methods of analysis, across all its schools, either wittingly or unwittingly,are a matter of relations between signs and sign users, the latter of whichare thoroughly semiotized by virtue of their existence in a comprehen-sively semiotic environment, observed by analysts of signs who inhabitan analogously semiotic environment.

4.6. Pragmaticism

Having made these general statements about the relation of sociosemi-otics and the pragmatic perspective it is necessary, nevertheless, to makeone qualification regarding an intellectual tradition that has been impor-tant for semiotics. ‘Pragmaticism,’ as is well known, was introduced byPeirce in his later writings to distinguish his concept of pragmatism fromthose of James and others. In 1905, he wrote

No doubt, Pragmaticism makes thought ultimately apply to action exclusively —to conceived action. But between admitting that and either saying that it makesthought, in the sense of the purport of symbols, to consist in acts, or saying thatthe true ultimate purpose of thinking is action, there is much the same di¤erenceas there is between saying that the artist-painter’s living art is applied to dabbingpaint upon canvas, and saying that that art-life consists in dabbing paint, or thatits ultimate aim is dabbing paint. Pragmaticism makes thinking consist in theliving inferential metaboly of symbols whose purport lies in conditional generalresolutions to act. (CP 5.402)

With this perspective on action considered, and if the human’s world issemiotically created and maintained, then the meta-level must concen-trate on the study of methods people use to build the sociocultural envi-ronment. Ultimately, one could argue, pragmaticism gave rise to ethno-methodology (Garfinkel 1967), and in more particular ways, throughso-called verstehen-methodology (Schutz 1967 [1932]), also to studies ofthe resolution of social situations under the conceptions of ConversationAnalysis (Sacks 1992) and discourse analysis (originating with Harris1952). Discourse analysis constantly brings sociocultural studies back tonotions of representation. Although it developed separately from ethno-methodology, ‘discourse analysis,’ particularly in its later developments,is similar in its aims to Conversation Analysis. Works in discourse analy-sis share a commitment to the general idea that meaning and social rolesare produced in interaction. Similarly to pragmaticism, forms of commu-nication between humans are not simply a matter of attempting to ‘re-flect’ the world; rather, they are forms of social action.

20 P. Cobley and A. Randviir

In addition to its roots in pragmaticism, the social constructionist posi-tion of much discourse analysis can be traced back to Volosinov, anotherkey figure for sociosemiotics in di¤erent ways, whose 1920s critique ofSaussure and Marr in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language (1973)emphasized at length that verbal communication is much more a matterof what people want to get out of a situation than a matter of pure infor-mation exchange. In this respect, there is a clear line forward to discourseanalysis generally and Conversation Analysis specifically as well as moreemphatically constructionist methodologies still, such as discursive psy-chology (e.g., Potter and Wetherell 1987). The idea that words do thingsrather than merely describing things, of course, was the focus of thecelebrated discussion in Austin’s How to do Things with Words (1961),an intervention whose broad influence in the world of communicationand sign study is not to be underestimated (see Cobley 2006).

What might be the central dilemma of sociosemiotics, then, is the ex-tent to which it is pulled towards a conception of ‘signs in relation tonon-signs’ and/or ‘signs and action versus signs as action.’ Many wouldnot wish to subscribe to the extreme constructionist position that every-thing is ‘constructed in discourse,’ an outgrowth of the much vaunted ‘lin-guistic turn’ (Rorty 1967); however, equally, it is the case that there is arecognition of the semiotic nature of the environment in which humansfind themselves and through which they make observations. Metaphorssuch as ‘language’ or ‘text’ have been heuristic extrapolation devices serv-ing sociosemiotics. As with the machinery of science, designed to capturephenomena that it has hitherto been impossible to observe, it is neverguaranteed that machinery provides the observer with meaning or mean-ingfulness, as opposed to mere physical information (see Russell 1948:chapters 3 and 7; Pelc 1992: 33). Thus a vital distinction has to be madebetween the existence of an entity as a sign, on the one hand, and theexistence of something as being interpretable as a sign, on the other (seePelc 1992: 26). In short, what is understood by the ‘sign’ has direct impacton what can be studied under the general label of ‘culture’ or ‘society.’

5. Sociosemiotic terms

The di‰culties of establishing what exactly a sign is are most manifest insociosemiotics’ insistence on a fairly uniform repertoire of combinationsof signs and the (sometimes considerable) di¤erences between schools inapproaching them. The main examples of combinations of signs and signfunctioning repeatedly employed by schools of sociosemiotics can belisted as follows:

Introduction 21

– social structure– representation– dialogue– the other– multimodality– discourse– motivation (in signs and in combinations of signs)– identity– genre (routinization of communicational forms)

The list might be extended but it would be di‰cult to shorten it. Aboveall, though, even more than a relation of signs to ‘non-signs,’ what thislist implies is a set of terms in which signs are subject to social forces(which may be semiotic in themselves) or ‘signs in society.’ That is, thecompound of individual, society, sign systems, and sociocultural reality.

Unsurprisingly, the concept of the ‘self-in-society’ is also implied in theseterms. In the study of culture and society, developments at the object-level have usually gone hand in hand with the meta-level. In other words,the search for the sources of sociosemiotics has to take into account thesituation of the inception of contemporary disciplines at the turn of thenineteenth and the twentieth centuries. In this light, ‘self-in-society’ as aconcern of sociosemiotics has developed out of a number of binaries thatcharacterized the early social sciences. These were the oppositions of

– developed cultures versus primitive cultures– developed specimens of the human race versus others– societies, or social orders, or civilized orders versus cultures, or cul-

tural orders– processes versus structures– consciously intentional versus instinctive– rational thought, or reflection versus unconscious motivation, or nat-

ural program– human emotions versus ritualistic routine– sign-based behavior versus signal-based behavior

Most of the first elements in each of these oppositions have been a matterfor philosophy; yet, they have been adjusted to a meta-level when consid-ered in the frame of the self and society. At the same time, it is possible tosee these oppositions within the frame of an overarching opposition —tackled at length in more recent semiotics — that of humanity versus theanimal kingdom; although, clearly, this overarching opposition also par-takes of that social science staple between developed cultures/societiesand individuals versus primitive cultures and individuals.

22 P. Cobley and A. Randviir

The relation of animal and human worlds in understanding the devel-opment of the self in sociosemiotics is worth commenting on here. Muchof the groundwork on modern theory of the self was laid down by Cooley(1902, 1909, 1918) and, in turn, Mead’s treatment of the self as a dynamicprocess resulting from social communication (1907, 1913, 1922, 1930)was comprehensively based on Cooley. There is little di‰culty in recruit-ing Mead into the ranks of (socio)semioticians (cf. Wiley 1994 and, espe-cially, Kilpinen 2000). If Saussure’s placing of ‘semiology’ alongsidesocial or general psychology, or Peirce’s equation of semiotics and logicis taken into account, not to mention Mead’s adoption of Peirce’s triadiclogic and his influence on Morris (see Mead 1934, 1938), Mead’s positionin semiotics is further strengthened. Understanding the self as a productof social communication, Mead relates to the paradigm of the Frankfurtschool and the topic of socialization and the social construction of real-ity (Berger and Luckmann 1972). However, in his social behaviorism,Mead’s position is close to that of Morris, which is far from ‘common be-haviorism,’ since the social in this case concerns the behavior of the self inthe mind. Mead realized that humans as biological beings live in theworld(s) of sign systems, and modeling takes place already on the levelof perception, since perceptual objects are results of interaction betweenman and his environment (Mead 1938: 81). Sebeok’s discussion of model-ing after the Tartu-Moscow school (Sebeok 1988), a discussion that ulti-mately crystallized Modeling Systems Theory and biosemiotics, clearlydeveloped out of this tradition. Moreover, Sebeok was a student of Mor-ris and thus at least indirectly acquainted with Mead. As has been men-tioned, the theory of Umwelt (Uexkull 1982) is crucial here. Yet, whilesociosemiotic studies have not always adopted this term, they have, inMead’s wake, figured the self in relation to some key processes or entitiesthat determine the self ’s ‘social reality’ (as opposed to any ‘individualreality’ that may be perceived to exist independently).

As a result, it is possible to draw up a list of the key entities that makeup the concerns of sociosemiotics in its discussions of the self ’s relationto/constitution by social reality:

– organization– intentionality– exchange– communication– interaction-communication– process-structure– praxis– agency

Introduction 23

– socialization– culture (and multiculturalism)– ideology– institution– modernity– globalization

This is not an exhaustive list, by any means. But it should o¤er an idea ofthe ways in which the issues of sign combinations and fundamental socio-cultural oppositions produce a concern with a fairly specific set of entitiesor processes. To put it another way, it gives a sense of what are the fore-most preoccupations in the discussion of signs in relation to the supposed‘non-signs’ of the social.

6. The places of sociosemiotics

In addition to his countless contributions to semiotics, Sebeok was alsoinstrumental in guiding its meta-analysis. Adopting from Czsikszentmi-hali the terms ‘field’ and ‘domain,’ his work is always sensitive to theways in which semiotic endeavor is constituted by a set of symbolic rulesand procedures but also comprises various personages — journal or bookseries editors, professional organizations, compilers of widely-used refer-ence material, conference organizers, leaders of important research cen-ters or ‘schools,’ popular lecturers, and so forth — located in specificareas around the globe and in specific institutions whose work and inter-actions determine a domain (see Sebeok 2001: 163–164). Certainly, giventhe fragmentary nature of sociosemiotics that this special issue has at-tempted in a small and preliminary way to ameliorate, there at least needsto be an outline sense of the field and domain.

One way to e¤ect this sense is to o¤er some brief comments on the‘places’ of sociosemiotics, particularly as they are represented in the es-says that follow. This special issue does not o¤er the definitive, compre-hensive picture of contemporary sociosemiotics but it does attempt anoverview, comprising the ‘Anglo-Australian school,’ the ‘Bari school,’the ‘Finnish school,’ Tartu sociosemiotics, the Greek ‘school’ centered inThessaloniki, the ‘Vienna school,’ as well as contributions beyond theseschools. Each contribution from each school has a di¤erent take on theissues of sign combinations, fundamental sociocultural oppositions, andthe crucial entities or processes in sociosemiotics. These should becomeclear in the papers that follow, but comment on the places of sociosemi-otics is written here to o¤er some further orientation.

24 P. Cobley and A. Randviir

In brief, the Anglo-Australian school does not have a definitive placebeyond the United Kingdom (and North America) and Australasia ingeneral. However, it does center on the teachings of the British linguistMichael A. K. Halliday, a well-traveled scholar influenced by Russian(including Vygotsky and Luria) as well as British (Firth and Bernstein)thinkers and influencing scholars in the UK and Australia while living inthose places (for example, the German-Australian, Gunther Kress). TheAnglo-Australian school has seen much movement and contains its owndiversity, featuring scholars who have moved between the UK and Aus-tralia (e.g., Van Leeuwen, Threadgold). In this special issue, the Dutchscholar Van Leeuwen (Sydney) and the erstwhile particle physicist Lemke(Michigan) are the most prominent, ‘card-carrying members’ of this‘school,’ Lemke, of course, being located not in the UK or Australia butin the US. Fairclough has been su‰ciently influential in his own right asthe promulgator of CDA, generating projects and supporting students atthe University of Lancaster, but belongs here by virtue of his intellectualnurturing by some of the same forces as those such as Kress and otherrepresentatives of this school. Hess-Luttich on the other hand, has notbeen directly connected with Anglo-Australian sociosemiotics and worksin Bern; nevertheless, he gives an account that is very much cognate withthe school. Finally, one of the editors of this special issue, while comingto semiotics from a very di¤erent route and in a later generation, has beenencouraged by the work of the school as well as by some of its members.

The Bari school is distinctive for its marrying of influences from Se-beok, Rossi-Landi, Levinas, and the Bakhtin school. Revolving aroundthe key concept of ‘dialogue,’ the school’s commitment to a critical socio-semiotics, especially in the face of global communication, has most re-cently led to the development of a ‘semioethics’ and, in collaborationwith Deely, the notion of the ‘semiotic animal’ (Deely, Petrilli, and Pon-zio 2006). The key representatives of the Bari school, Petrilli and Ponzio,although frequently collaborating with each other and with other schools,most notably the Vienna school and the Rossi-Landi network, also pur-sue their own projects of great pertinence, for example Petrilli’s majorunearthing of the formidable work of Victoria, Lady Welby.

There are three contributions from the University of Helsinki thatmake up the ‘Finnish school’ in this special issue, although it should bementioned that semiotics and sociosemiotics are conducted at a numberof universities in Finland and in collaboration with international col-leagues. Semiotics has a strong tradition in Finland, partly because ofSebeok’s input in Fenno-Ugrian studies but also because of the work ofindigenous scholars such as Oscar Parland. One such indigenous figureis Eero Tarasti, a major convener of semiotics through the International

Introduction 25

Semiotics Institute since the 1980s (which hosted the original week-longsociosemiotics panel upon which this special issue is based), through hissynthesis of ‘existential semiotics’ (Tarasti 2000) and now as president ofthe IASS. The strong pragmatist and Peircean tradition in Finnish semi-otics, coupled with logic — evident also in the work of the Finnish philos-opher Jaako Hintikka and, arguably, in that of his countryman, Henrikvon Wright — can be detected in the essays of Kilpinen (a specialist onMead) and Heiskala, below.

Amid the influences of Greek sociology one can find the sociosemioticsor social semiotics of Lagopoulos and his collaborator in Thessaloniki,Karin Boklund-Lagopoulou, as well as an important body of work car-ried out with Lagopoulos’ frequent US collaborator, Mark Gottdiener.Gottdiener and Lagopoulos have been described as ‘the two writers mostinvolved in translating social semiotics into a study of space’ (Peet 1998:120). This is a fair comment. Lagopoulos’ work has been influential inboth the definition and dissemination of sociosemiotics while also bring-ing the sociosemiotic nature of space to the very fore of semiotics.

Although Tartu is rightly associated with the school founded by Lot-man during the Soviet period, it should not be forgotten that the projectof cultural semiotics is taught in the Semiotics Department there along-side a specifically designated sociosemiotics. One of the editors teachesthis but, also, one of the special issue’s contributors, Drechsler, was, untilrecently, a scholar at Tartu and remains in Estonia. As has been discussedabove, cultural semiotics featured descriptive concepts familiar to most ofsociosemiotics, but lacked a consistent, unified methodology to deal withthe generality of its objects of analysis (e.g., ‘semiosphere’; cf. Randviir2004: 67–70). Tartu sociosemiotics has been dedicated to rectifying thissituation.

The sociosemiotics of the Institute for Sociosemiotic Studies in Viennais strongly influenced by Rossi-Landi’s work and has been responsible forimportant collaborations with the Bari school. Yet, it is also appropriatethat it retains an interest in (especially the later) Wittgenstein’s inputto semiotic perspectives. This is appropriate not just because of Witt-genstein’s association with Vienna but because of Rossi-Landi’s well-known association with Wittgenstein. Taking up one of the key themesmentioned above in ‘Sources and correspondences,’ Bernard’s essay, be-low, presents a complex schema based on all of Vienna sociosemiotics’interests.

Lying outside more or less distinct sociosemiotic schools, but neverthe-less influential, are a number of scholars, exemplified in this special issueby James Wertsch and Thomas Luckmann. In fact, Wertsch’s work bearsclose a‰nities with that of the Bari sociosemiotians in its invocation of

26 P. Cobley and A. Randviir

Bakhtin, with parts of the Anglo-Australian tradition in its use of Vygot-skian perspectives and with the constructionism that runs through muchsociosemiotics. Like Wertsch, Luckmann’s influence has been great with-out him adhering to any particular sociosemiotic school. Indeed, onecould argue that sociosemiotics owes much to Luckmann as one of thefounding fathers of the sociology of knowledge. Like Wertsch, his influ-ence on sociosemiotics derives from the ways in which he has shown thatsocial construction takes place in a complex way involving specific rela-tionships ‘from below’ and ‘from above.’ His phenomenological workbears close a‰nities with the Finnish school and the sociosemiotics ofTartu, particularly in relation to pragmatist principles running througheach.

Not all the contributions betray all the sources and correspondencesmentioned above, but some of them betray a few at once. Thus it is easyto see the influence or dilemmas of cultural anthropology (Van Leeuwen,Heiskala, Wertsch, Fairclough, Tarasti, Petrilli, Lemke), cultural semiot-ics, (Petrilli, Heiskala, Lagopoulos, Wertsch, Hess-Luttich, Luckmann,Drechsler), sociology and the social sciences (all of the contributions),Marxism (Ponzio, Petrilli, Lagopoulos, Bernard), pragmatics (Fair-clough, Hess-Luttich), pragmaticism (Kilpinen, Luckmann, Tarasti), aswell as constructionism (Luckmann, Tarasti). Nevertheless, to o¤er amore defined sense of this special issue as an overview of contemporarysemiotics, as well as some orientation, a few summarizing comments fol-low on the essays taken in turn.

7. From foundations to global communication

To highlight some of the unifying thematic concerns of sociosemiotics, thisspecial issue is divided into four (unequal) parts: politico-philosophicalfoundations of sociosemiotics; space, identity, and memory; genres andliteracies; and, probably the largest issue facing sociosemiotics today,global communication. Indeed, the first contribution in the opening sec-tion takes a highly theoretical look at a micro-phenomenon but is suf-fused by the zeitgeist of ‘globalism.’ Tarasti’s essay focuses on ‘resistance’and the role that semiotics has to play in it. Exemplifying some of theoppositional stance of sociosemiotics (oppositional, at least, to the myth-ical ‘mainstream’ semiotics), Tarasti posits resistance through the lens ofhis ‘existential semiotics,’ based on Greimas but also a lineage comprisingBergson, Aron, von Wright, Ricoeur, and Elias, and ultimately back toHegel in its mapping of the logics of ‘transcendence.’ As an illustra-tive case, Tarasti focuses on the aesthetics of resistance in painting, print

Introduction 27

fiction, and music, making points about resistance that are not dissimilarfrom those of one French theorist he does not cite, Alain Badiou (seeBadiou 2001).

Given the implicit, but frequently explicit, trajectory of sociosemiotics,Drechsler’s essay that follows could not be any more direct. Entitled, sim-ply, ‘Political semiotics,’ the essay laments the regression of the full-blownpolitical potential of semiotics. Certainly, from outside semiotics, it mightbe easy to join in with these lamentations, and Drechsler is a political sci-entist. However, the essay shows he is very well versed in the literature ofcontemporary semiotics, to which, with his essay, he makes an incisivecontribution. The essay pointedly distinguishes four of the customary ap-proaches to political semiotics:

1. political statements by semioticians2. political work based on semiotics3. specifically political semiotics (akin to political philosophy, say)4. semiotic theory that may be used in political analysis

He notes that there have been fusions of di¤erent classifications and dis-cusses the previously most viable of the categories (number 2). Then hegoes on in a forward-looking way to suggest futures for political semioticsbased on number 3. His selection of oeuvres on which to base such futures— Cassirer, Jung, Uexkull — is curious, but very persuasive.

In politics, as in other places traversed by signs, one of the issues that iscrucial to sociosemiotics and recurs in this special issue is routinization —in communication, in practices, and in social actions. Erkki Kilpinen getsto the root of this matter by providing an extended meditation on theterm ‘habit’ that has been so central to pragmatism and to semiotics, aswell as, in the di¤erent ways he shows, to sociology. Kilpinen refracts hismeditation through a focus on the work of Stephen Turner, particularlythe fortunes of ‘habit’ in his work, as Turner moved through the ‘practiceturn’ towards a cognitive science view of the world. As Kilpinen pointsout, in Peirce’s thinking ‘habit’ is ‘the foundational mode of action, bothdescriptively and logically (rationally) conceived’ and was key to all thepragmatists’ subsequent work, especially that of Dewey. What is foundin Turner’s theorizing is an attempt, in one sense, to overturn ‘habit’ inrelation to the sociologically more mainstream (after Parsons) notion of‘action.’ Kilpinen’s essay therefore provides the theoretical grounds forsociosemiotics to decide whether habit should be a basic notion (withaction a residue) or whether action should be the basic notion (with habita residue).

Ponzio’s essay likewise considers a basic notion that is attendanton the composition of the sign and the e¤ect of it: dialogue. Clearly, if

28 P. Cobley and A. Randviir

the ‘social’ of sociosemiotics is to be realized, dialogue must be an in-herent concept. However, Ponzio’s dialogue is not merely a to-ing andfro-ing between sign users as Saussure tended to envisage. Indeed, forPonzio, an accurate picture of what dialogue entails is to be foundin three bodies of knowledge. The first of these is Peircean sign theory,especially in the mutual demands of the interpreted and interpretantrelationship. Although the Peircean sign is resolutely triadic and dy-namic, Ponzio demonstrates that, through the integral feature of theinterpretant, it is nevertheless dialogic: the sign is first a response. Theuse of ‘response’ and a seemingly bilateral relation does not amountto neo-behaviorism, however. Ponzio demonstrates this with a secondbody of knowledge, that of Bakhtin, in whose work ‘dialogue’ is the resultof constant compulsion by the other rather than liberal initiatives towardsa common ground. In general, this is exemplified by the distinction be-tween ‘formal dialogism’ (the deliberate meeting of two entities within agiven discourse genre) and ‘substantial dialogism,’ which pervades allcommunication with its demands. The third body of knowledge uponwhich Ponzio draws is biosemiotics, particularly the work of Jakob andThure von Uexkull. Derived from the latter, Ponzio identifies the threerealms of semiosis, in each of which, as he explains, dialogue subsists:1) semiosis of information or signification; 2) semiosis of symptomatization;3) semiosis of communication. As with Petrilli’s essay, below, Ponzio’sargument is redolent of the richness of one part of Bari sociosemioticsin its marriage of principles from Peirce, Bakhtin, and contemporarybiosemiotics.

Continuing the theme of basic processes internal to and the result ofthe workings of signs, Je¤ Bernard’s essay is concerned with perception.It presents a complex theoretical schema of sign actions as work. Work,of course, was a central concept in the semiotic investigations of Ferruc-cio Rossi-Landi, an important figure in Bari sociosemiotics as well as theViennese semiotics from which Bernard’s essay hails. Bernard’s essayshows how ‘work’ can be translated into ‘sign work’ to elucidate the ideaof ‘perception’ (which is so often defined in a vague way, inside andoutside psychology). Crucial to this is the Rossi-Landian perspective on‘internal’ and ‘external’ signs, the relation of which is the key factor inanother matter of paramount import to sociosemiotics: social reproduc-tion. Interestingly, Bernard pursues this with further reference to thework of a ‘crypto-semiotician,’ Wittgenstein. Through Bezzel’s inflectionof Wittgenstein, the essay thus draws out the ‘game’ relations in the‘work’ of looking and seeing.

Following this essay on perception, the next section, fittingly, focuseson space, identity, and memory, and features three essays on precisely

Introduction 29

those topics. Of course, perception has a bearing on everything in semi-otics, as well as in many other established disciplines. Moreover, it in-creasingly su¤uses one of the key concepts of contemporary semiotics,mentioned above, that of Umwelt (from Jakob von Uexkull). However,space, identity, and memory — not just because they are key contempo-rary topics in other disciplines — are arguably the most powerful vectorsin sociosemiotics.

As Lagopoulos shows, built space, like many other objects of study insociosemiotics, is a matter of economic, technological, social, and politi-cal processes. However, as such, the extent to which it is also a semioticprocess is vastly underestimated, both in the academy and in the widersocio-political sphere. Thus, sociosemiotics is necessary and crucial; asLagopoulos writes, it ‘constitutes an independent, free-floating approachwithin the social sciences.’ It also enables a broad approach: Lagopoulosuses three extended examples in his discussion: (precapitalist) Dogon cul-ture, Western modernist post-Enlightenment culture, and Western post-modernism (the cultural formation of late capitalism). What the essaydemonstrates is that the precapitalist world view performed an anthropo-morphic and cosmic metaphorization of space, creating an experientialcollective place. The modernist intervention in space, on the other hand,was characterized by Fordism (and, presumably, Taylorism), the meta-phor of identity (cf. Ponzio) as well as post-Romantic metaphors of na-ture. Late capitalism developed a major metaphor of consumerism (whichcan be seen in Disneyfication or Las Vegasization), marrying space andconsumerist identity.

The identity that is the focus of Risto Heiskala’s essay is gender. Theessay gives an exceptionally clear account of the problems of gender asconsidered by sociology — but it does not stop there: it also o¤ers someinvaluable analysis from the perspectives of both semiotics and biology.Typically in sociosemiotics, the account of gender describes how it over-determined by motivation — both semiotic and, in this case, biological.As Heiskala reinforces, social semiosis still reproduces the gender distinc-tion even if the biological motivation for it has been loosened. Althoughtyrannies associated with gender distinction are increasingly removedfrom Western legislation, the essay shows how gender now constitutesa semiotic system sustained by sociocultural intuitions. Adroitly using anumber of sociological and semiotic perspectives — including the frameanalysis of the semiotic sociologist/sociological semiotician ErvingGo¤man — the essay cuts a path through radical constructionism and bi-ological determinism, presenting a very contemporary semiotic perspec-tive that can embrace and analyze the contradictions in the coexistenceof order and chaos.

30 P. Cobley and A. Randviir

Wertsch’s essay on collective memory acts both as a cogent introduc-tion to this burgeoning and innovatory field of inquiry as well as a dem-onstration of its foundations in semiotics and its importance for socio-semiotics. Wertsch identifies a number of parameters for discussingcollective memory: memory versus remembering; collective versus indi-vidual remembering: collective remembering versus history: and strongversus distributed versions of collective remembering. However, hechooses to focus on distributed versions of collective remembering, utiliz-ing the idea of ‘semiotic mediation’ to show the good reason for this. Inthe classic accounts of Halbwachs and Bartlett, as Wertsch shows, thelatter criticized the former for implying that the memory of a group(strong version) should be studied as opposed to memory in the group(distributed version in which there is no notion of ‘collective mind’).Implementing, also, Assman’s distinction of ‘history’ and ‘memory,’Wertsch asks what sorts of signs are involved in distributed memory thatdistinguish them from those in mechanism of memory identified by psy-chology in ‘individuals.’ The essay finds answers for sociosemiotics inthe distinction of local dialogue and generalized dialogue from Bakhtin,the latter of which, unsurprisingly recalls Ponzio’s arguments regardingsubstantial dialogue.

Having mentioned the process of routinization, the section on genresand literacies provides a little more focus. Ernest Hess-Luttich’s essaygives an excellent overview of some of the key questions with which lan-guage study has been concerned since the heyday of sociolinguistics andsince a (socio)semiotic viewpoint became increasingly important to rescu-ing linguistics from its moribund state. The essay specifically asks how itmight be possible to ascertain the social meaning of linguistic structures.To this, it adds the question of the social meaning of certain expressionsat di¤erent linguistic levels of description. The answers Hess-Luttichpro¤ers are largely Hallidayan in orientation; however, the virtue of hisoverview is that it is not just based on Anglophone, Anglo-Australianperspectives, but on a more comprehensive grasp of the literature. Thecrux of the essay is in the final case study on prestige. The essay drawsout the way in which linguistic signs are an ‘expression of the self: thespeaker conveys to others his identity in terms of a ‘person’ or a ‘socialsubject.’ ’ This is by no means a new insight or area of inquiry; however,in tracking the distinction of signification from expression back to Buhler,Hess-Luttich provides a new lineage and orientation for language-basedsociosemiotics.

Luckmann’s essay directly considers the issue of routinization in com-munication. It argues that, like institutions, genres are a universal elementin human communication; a part of communicative practice in all human

Introduction 31

societies, although he stresses that not every process of human communi-cation is determined by genre. Furthermore, genres are indispensable be-cause they eliminate the need for ‘laborious step-by-step planning.’ This isthe case in a number of codes: linguistic, paralinguistic, mimetic, gestural,etc. Luckmann does make the important point that genres are sociallydistributed — some people within certain classifications and identitieswill have access to some genres; other people, from di¤erent classifica-tions and identities will not have access to these genres. Yet, the essay iskeen to emphasize the huge number of genres (akin to Bakhtin’s ‘speechgenres’) and the ‘specific social function’ of genres (cf. the TorontoSchool). Thus, each society will have genres relating to collective mem-ory, didactic genres, and moral(izing) genres with similarities in historicalforms. Given the social and ideological consequences of routinization it ishardly surprising that genre maintains a central position in sociosemioticstudies.

In addition to genre, one of the shibboleths of the ‘discourse study’branch (especially CDA) of sociosemiotics in recent years has been ‘mul-timodality.’ However, the touting of multimodality has not necessarilylived up to its promise. In a post-linguistic environment, it seems thatCDA has simply been announcing that there are some pictures to lookat in everyday communication nowadays, as well as words, as though‘mainstream’ semiotics had never noticed this. However, the brief histori-cal survey of kinds of multimodal text which appears in the initial stagesof Lemke’s essay goes some way to correcting the banality of such CDAperspectives. The essay draws attention, in particular, to the relations oftext and image in scientific discourse, noticing key turning points in theseventeenth century. Within a specific scientific text (including writingand images), there may be certain expected trajectories (e.g., from writingto image and back) in reading; the same is true especially on websiteswhich provide hypertext links to di¤erent areas of that same website.However, Lemke is interested in the moment when such a trajectory be-comes a ‘transmedia traversal’? When reading moves from di¤erent web-sites, and across boundaries of genre, language, culture, and institutions.In one sense, it could be argued that the sign user is caught in a web ofroutinizations of the kind discussed by Luckmann. Yet, Lemke also pointsout that there is a degree of choice in the traversal, a possibility of escapefrom the institutional limitations of each separate genre. Of course, theindustry of marketing is well up on this: thus, as the essay points out, ithas become adept in developing transmedia franchises that cross genresand media. Work on fandom and ‘participatory culture’ has, to some ex-tent, demonstrated the existence of the ‘cracks in the carefully constructedand conventionalized facades of transmedia unity’ that Lemke identifies.

32 P. Cobley and A. Randviir

Genre literacy is clearly ubiquitous but, as the term ‘literacy’ suggests,there is a process by which it is attained. As sociosemiotics repeatedlyshows, learning how to communicate is simultaneously a matter of learn-ing how to classify the world. Van Leeuwen’s innovative essay looks attoys for very small children, an object of study that has been pursued inpsychoanalysis (by Freud and Erikson, for example), but all too infre-quently in semiotics. Specifically, Van Leeuwen analyses the social rolesand identities called into play by the highly successful Playmobil figu-rines. In the Hallidayan tradition, the investigation foregrounds the im-portance of roles and actors in semiosis, paying close attention to roles/actors that are excluded as well as those that are included. As the essayattests, ‘Semiotic systems are always a mixture of a¤ordance and con-straint.’ Playmobil (in contrast to Lego, for example) is shown to bestronger on constraints than a¤ordances, however. As a global brandand genre, the figures of Playmobil have the potential to influence nascentperceptions of the way that social actors operate.

As Van Leeuwen’s essay shows, sociosemiotic microanalysis commonlyconstitutes an investigation of signs locally within a frame of thinkingglobally. The final two contributions in this special issue are more directin dealing with global issues. Norman Fairclough considers discourse inprocesses of globalization. He finds that genres (once again) are crucial,particularly in the way they are ‘specialized for trans-national and interre-gional interaction’ (e.g., CNN). He also points out that there is the pro-cess of globalization, which is demonstrable and economically visible, butthat this is a concomitant discursive construction of the process that goesby the same name. The essay argues that there is a need to closely analyzethe relationship between the process and the representation, which Fair-clough proceeds to do, focusing on strategies of globalization emanatingfrom governmental and non-governmental agencies, how processes ofglobalization impact upon spatial ‘entities’ such as nations, people’s ordi-nary experience of globalization, and, finally, with war and terrorism.What the essay shows is that integral to the processes of globalization isa ‘language dimension.’ Indeed, Fairclough’s approach to the issues athand serves to significantly reinflect the globalization debate associatedwith the likes of Beck, Giddens, Schiller, et al. in a more semiotic direc-tion without losing their insights.

Where Fairclough analyses verbal discourse in global communication,Petrilli calls for an even broader push. She makes the point in her essaythat globalization is commonly understood as a socio-economic phenom-enon, but that it is also a semiotic phenomenon. As with Ponzio’s essay,the synthesis of Peircean sign theory, Bakhtinian dialogue, and biosemi-otics (especially, Sebeok) is typical of the core of Bari sociosemiotics.

Introduction 33

Based on the idea of the ‘semiotic animal’ as elucidated by Petrilli, Pon-zio, and Deely, she presents an outline of ‘semioethics,’ an imperativethat is not merely discursively constructed but, instead, is the result ofthe ‘concrete’ demands of the other (Levinas, as well as Bakhtin, is a keyfigure, here). One impediment to the realization of dialogue (cf. Ponzio’s‘substantial dialogue’) has been the liberal notion of dialogue as the resultof an initiative to be taken in discourse. Without announcing a pro-gramme, Petrilli shows that semioethics entails not just the constantdemands of the other but, also, a perspective that reaches beyond theglottocentrism of liberal dialogue to embrace the semiosis of the entiresemio/biosphere. The essay concludes with theses. E¤ectively, these aretheses for a projected sociosemiotics, so central are their concerns to thosewe have outlined as somehow characteristic of this putative subfield.However, in consonance with Sebeok’s repeated statements to the samee¤ect, the theses are for, more plainly, semiotics. And, although Petrillio¤ers only ten theses (from the ‘Bari-Lecce school’), it is clear that heressay is most inspired by an eleventh thesis from elsewhere: that of Marxon Feuerbach.

Note

* Anti Randviir’s collaboration on this article has been supported by Estonian ScienceFoundation grant 6729.

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Paul Cobley (b. 1963) is a Reader at London Metropolitan University 3p.cobley@londonmet.ac.uk4. His research interests include semiotics, the work of Thomas A. Sebeok,subjectivity, and communication theory. His publications include The American Thriller(2000); Narrative (2001); The Routledge Companion to Semiotics and Linguistics (ed., 2001);and Communication Theories (ed., 2006).

Anti Randviir (b. 1975) is a Senior Researcher at the University of Tartu 3randviir@ut.ee4.His research interests include sociosemiotics, theory of semiotics, and comparative meth-odology of humanities and social sciences. His publications include Mapping the World:Towards a Sociosemiotic Approach to Culture (2004); ‘Spatialization of knowledge: Carto-graphic roots of globalization’ (2004); ‘Sociosemiotic perspectives on studying culture andsociety’ (2001); and ‘Cultural semiotics and social meaning’ (2005).

Introduction 39