The Semiotic Self
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The Semiotic Self.
Selected type: Paperback. Added to Your Shopping Cart. This is a dummy description. This work offers a novel and challenging interpretation of the nature of the self. In opposition to currently fashionable theories, Wiley argues that the self is an integral and autonomous entity.
vol. 9 n.º 24 (2013): The semiotic construction of Self
The self is interpreted as a semiotic structure and on this basis the author presents an original analysis of the origins of self-identity. The book draws particularly upon two philosophical sources: the writings of Charles Sanders Peirce and George Herbert Mead. The result is a "trialogical" model in which the present self "I" talks to the future self "you" about the past self "me".
A distinctive feature of Wiley's view is that there is a mutually-supportive relation between the self and democracy, a view which he traces through American history. Table of contents List of Figures and Tables. Author's Note. The Politics of Identity in American History. Peirce and Mead on the Semiotic Self. The pragmatists' self was inherently social and therefore public and political. For faculty psychology the individual and society were at distance, requiring social contracts in politics and markets in economics to unite them.
For the pragmatists the individual and the social were interpenetrating. This is because all conscious processes were based on an outside or social perspective. Markets and social contracts merely refined an already existing social solidarity.
For pragmatism it was a horizontal structure, consisting of temporal phases of the self. For Peirce these phases were called the "I" and the "you. To describe this uniformity pragmatism demoted the passions of faculty psychology into the less influential category of impulses. In turn, interests and reason were merged in the horizontal semiotic process.
All humans had the same psychological equipment in the same way.
Human variation into identity groupings and unique individualities was a matter of differing symbols and their interpretations. The social Darwinists were explaining human identities, particularly ethnicity, biologically, by what they were calling "instincts. The pragmatists' self was extremely plastic; communication could produce all manner of variations, and the perplexing variations in the new immigrants could be fully explained semiotically, interactionally, and culturally.
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The pragmatists, instead, attributed a capacity for self-determination or psychological freedom to the individual, i. In contrast to the semi-determinism of the founding fathers, this freedom had more deeply libertarian implications for law, civil liberties, and democratic self-government.
The anthropologists, particularly Franz Boas and his students, discovered culture macroscopically and from above. The pragmatists discovered it microscopically and from below. Once humans were theorized as semiotic the psychological preconditions of culture had been found and the cultural level itself could be identified. Neither British empiricism nor Scotch moralism had the idea of culture, although the latter's "common sense" was a move in that direction.
The concept of culture was useful if not indispensable for democracy, for it explained variation in identities in a way that was compatible with an egalitarian form of government. The founding fathers, to their great credit, created a sturdy if quite imperfect democracy. Unfortunately, like that of the Athenians, their democracy was symbiotic with slavery. Similarly the founders' theory of the self was theoretically undisciplined and allowed of a slave psychology.
The pragmatist self, more so than that of the fathers, had an elective affinity with democratic institutions. In addition the pragmatists got rid of slave psychology once and for all, showing how blacks and non-blacks alike have the standard and generic psychological equipment. These six traits made pragmatism a better democratic instrument than faculty psychology had been. Neither social Darwinism nor neo-Hegelianism could have been a democratic replacement for faculty psychology, the former reducing the self to the body and the latter to the community.
In contrast, pragmatism was a workable way of viewing human nature, despite the new stresses of industrialization, immigration, and urbanization, and if there was a "second founding," this was it. The Politics of Identity Today The pragmatist coalition, in my opinion, saved American democracy in the early 20th century. This was a case where ideas affected institutions, doing so by way of the social sciences and philosophy, the universities, law, religious liberalization, and some of the Progressive reforms.
Norbert Wiley “The Semiotic Self”
I think the idea of the free and equal semiotic self and the corresponding concept of culture gave equality a much firmer founding in American democracy than it ever had before. And it came just when it was needed, when America was sliding toward an early form of fascism. At the very least, it looks as though citizenship rights and civil liberties would have diminished if social Darwinism had not been checked by pragmatism.
James died in , Peirce in and Mead in , none leaving any great disciples. Dewey at Columbia lived until , but turned his interest more specifically to education. Except for the logical line of C. Lewis, W. Quine, and Nelson Goodman, pragmatism trickled off in the s, to be replaced by logical positivism in philosophy. In the decades since pragmatism's decline there have always been disciples of Peirce, Dewey, and Mead, but not many important new developments or ideas.
At the present time there are some influential calls for a neo-pragmatism in several disciplines, but not much new theory. The basic ideas of the pragmatist coalition, particularly those of equality and freedom, are still influential in the democratic institutions, but they are "living off their capital.
The Catholics and Jews, who were central to the turn-of-thecentury crisis, have been politically incorporated, but the other minorities are now in pronounced dissent. As of recent decades, blacks, hispanics, and women are demanding a fuller participation in democratic life. In addition Asian Americans, new and old, are beginning to form into a powerful minority group. Beyond this there is now a completely new identity problem coming from dissatisfied homosexual Americans, who are also asking for full citizenship.
Exacerbating this crisis is the fact that capitalism's living standards, especially in the USA, reached a plateau in the early s. During the prosperous years after World War II - approximately until the oil shock of - a workable way of placating minorities was built into the expanding economy, for the growing pie automatically increased everyone's share Wiley, Now there is both stalled growth and upward income redistribution, i.
These economic stresses are worsening the identity tensions. As I mentioned earlier, the two American theories of the democratic personality - faculty psychology and pragmatism - are not in a position to meet the current challenge. Instead the levelling down and levelling up strategies of biological Deglar, and cultural Rosenau, reduction are the focus of discussion.
But reductionist theories were not useful for the politics of identity in the late 19th century, nor are they any more so today. In this theoretical vacuum the possibility of a revitalized neo-pragmatism offers an intriguing prospect. I see this as the challenge of completing the pragmatic synthesis in a way that the classical pragmatists never quite did, and of incorporating ideas from other developments in philosophy.
In the next section I tum to these possibilities. This process explained identity variation in a way that was compatible with democracy. The theorists sketched the semiotic nature of the self in broad outlines but they did not work it out in detail. The two who contributed the most were Peirce and Mead, James and Dewey having worked primarily in other areas of pragmatism.
Neither Mead nor especially Peirce ever completed their theories of the self. In addition, each worked with somewhat different terms and concepts, making it difficult to combine the two sets of insights.
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Peirce's theory of the semiotic self, which he never integrated, has been systematized by the Peirce an scholar Vincent Colapietro Colapietro did not actually complete Peirce's theory of the self, but he went a long way toward making it more coherent Wiley, His interest was primarily in Peirce, and he did not attempt to combine Peirce and Mead but see Rochberg-Halton, , pp.
In a private communication to me, however, Colapietro suggested a tentative way of linking the two theories. This has to do with visualizing the self as a present-past-future, I-me-you semiotic triad. The major difference between Peirce and Mead, for present purposes, is in the temporal direction of the internal dialogue.
Mead has this conversation going temporally backwards, from present to past, or from I to me. Peirce has it going forward, from present to future or from I to "you" i.
Both versions produce a highly plastic, semiotic self, but at present they are side-by-side and have never been combined. Moreover, they are obviously not both right. If the self is a dialogue between present and future, then it is not a dialogue between present and past, and vice versa. Colapietro suggests a way of combining the two dialogical theories.
He dovetails them by linking them to the sign-object-interpretant structure of the semiotic triad. The details of this synthesis are somewhat technical, but I will gradually work my way back to the ordinary language of the politics of identity.