Meta: A Semiotic Websource |
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Volume 1 Issue 1
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Volume 2 Issue 1
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LAURA SHINTANI
By three paths: Professor Marcus in InterviewSolomon Marcus: University of Bucharest, Romania Context: June 15th, 1999 Midafternoon, very warm day. In a skylit alcove along the underground passageway between the new and old parts of the Valtionhotelli, Imatra, Finland. It is cool, quiet and echoey there. Two chairs and a coffee table. Content: How did I arrive to semiotics? By three paths: The first path is mathematics c, which is in some sense a chapter of semiotics Peirce was basically a mathematician; then after pure mathematics I became interested and became enough known in Mathematical and Computational Linguistics c. I took a slogan from Claude Lévi-Strauss: that linguistics is a pilot science and Jakobson said a similar thing: Linguistics is the mathematics of social sciences. Linguistics has the power of expansion into all other fields. By means of mathematical models, I realised that this function of language is a universal phenomenon, in science, in culture, in everyday life. Then I observed that the pattern called language has some restrictions, because it is always sequential. But what evolved so many phenomena that are not sequential but polydimensional? I needed something more general than linguistics and that was semiotics. This happened in the late s, when the International Association of Semiotics and the Journal Semiotica emerged. Then the third thing, which was important in the s: Thomas Sebeok came in Romania for the first time. He was invited to an international meeting, but at that time he was considered mainly as a linguist. He was the then editor of a huge encyclopaedia, Current Trends in Linguistics. He came to the city of Sinaia, in the mountains. I was not invited there, but by my own initiative and I went there to meet Sebeok. It was a difficult period, when Romanian scholars were not allowed to travel in noncommunist countries; the only possibility to contact western scholars was to have them in Romania. Professor Sebeok has understood this situation and was ready to help us. He was then known for linguistic and folkloristics. He invited me because I had published in international journals before, to write an account about mathematical linguistics in Europe. Then I said that there was something missing in his encyclopaedia linguistics as a pilot science; he immediately invited me to write this. Then I gave him both and he published there in Current Trends in Linguistics. He invited me to collaborate to Semiotica ; later in he organised the Linguistic Institute of America in Tampa, Florida and invited me there. So, Professor Sebeok created for me a practical context, to be involved in problems that I was always interested in . I became interested in semiotics, because it was for me the most advantageous and natural way to bridge mathematics and the other fields of research, be they scientific or artistic; semiotics became for me a framework of unification if human knowledge and human behaviour. Your studies in Romania and Your Students: I taught in the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Languages of the University of Bucharest; then I became very interested in poetics and I published a book called Mathematical Poetics and I gave classes on this. I attracted to my classes students of different backgrounds: mathematics, linguistics and humanities in general; the next step was semiotics. In the Proceedings of the first international semiotic congress in Milano, there are many Romanian contributions just on these topics, but no Romanian attended this congress. Umberto Eco was the organiser and I met him for the first time in Urbino in , and he invited me to give in Milano a plenary lecture on the semiotics of scientific languages. The communist power did not like the idea of us travelling abroad, because they wanted to "protect" us of contamination with capitalist behaviour. I asked for a passport, but it did not come. So the congress arrived and I did not have a passport. Eco called me and asked if I could not come, but we could not say that we could not get a passport, we were obliged to say that we are too ill or we are too busy. So I said that I am ill because all these telephone calls were checked, by the political power. Eco was very clever and he told the congress: look Solomon Marcus cannot come because he is sick; his sickness is called passport this was told to me by Professor Sebeok. Then at all these congresses of semiotics you can see in the Proceedings some Romanian contributions. One of our strongest schools was on the strategy of theatrical characters, semiotics of place of theatre. Too semiotics, of mathematics and linguistics. There is an account of Romanian semiotics by a Romanian semiotician, now in the United States, Sanda Golopontia, in the volume The Semiotic Sphere edited by T. A. Sebeok. Figures of Influence: Some years ago, Professor Sebeok asked me the same question, this was never published in Semiotica, because some scholars felt uncomfortable listing this kind of hierarchy. For me however, it is mathematics which fascinated me and mediated my way to semiotics. Mathematics is mediation, because it can describe both finite things and infinite things, that is why mathematics is my first teacher of semiotics. On Theatre: It is the model of human conflict, understood via the different configurations of characters in the successive scenes of a play. To each theatrical play we associate a Boolean matrix where each line corresponds to a character and each column is associated to a scene. At the intersection of line i with column j we insert the digit if the character i appears in the scene j ; we insert the digit in the contrary case. The process of this binary information , by adequate parameters and by computational means, leads to surprising conclusions; for instance, a great part of the information we apparently get from means of the theatrical dialogue, can be obtained from the evolution of configurations of characters along the successive scenes. On Poetry: I was attracted by the topological nature of the poetic semantic, as opposed to the discrete structure of the scientific language; there is a semiotic crisis in the former, due to the conflict between the continuous nature of its semantics and the discrete nature of its syntax no such conflict exists in scientific language. I tried to show that a deep understanding of the differences between the poetic and the scientific communication can be obtained only within the framework of similarities between the respective types of communication. On Semiotics: Semiotics is a common denominator of all creative fields. It is, to some extent, unavoidable, so most scientists and artists are doing semiotics in a very implicit way, i.e., without being aware of it. Doing work in semiotics but not using the title semiotics, this is sad and it is damaging to our field. Many discover semiotics very late when they are forty or fifty, for example the Nobel laureate in chemistry Roland Hoffman published a book call The Same and Not the Same from Princeton Univ. Press, practically on the semiotics of chemistry. He discovered this very late and this can be seen in other fields such as in medicine too. Maybe this will be the situation of semiotics for many years; this will not change very quickly. Semiotics is for most people a second step activity, in respect to hermeneutics, for example. Semiotics still fails in its attempts to be recognised as having an important impact on fields such as cognitive science, artificial intelligence, cryptography, computer science; but at the same time semiotics is slow in its capacity to acquire and process the great novelty of quantum physics, of computational biology, of biological computation etcetera. Its metabolism with other universal approaches such as system theory should be improved. Partly, the weak social impact of semiotics is due to its failure to become a recognised academic discipline you can count on your fingers the exceptions. It is here, to some extent, a vicious circle, because we may ask whether the failure in becoming an academic discipline is not just due to its weak social impact.. What brings mathematics near to semiotics? Like semiotics, mathematics is mediation, for instance between thermodynamics physics and information science, what made possible the transfer of entropy from physics to information sciences? This transfer became possible because the thermodynamic entropy has a mathematical expression a logarithmic one, which permits to separate the pattern of a phenomenon from its substantial, particular part. This pattern acquires, due to mathematics, a general form, that can be immediately adapted by the fields of completely a different nature. To give another example, the formal modelling of textual structures made possible the transfer of a text structure in fields different from languages: the world itself may become a text. Pedagogical Concerns?: Teaching is a prisoner of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century where all disciplines were separated. Generations after generations were educated in the spirit of an opposition between humanities and the sciences for example. Semiotics invites on the contrary, to transgress such false boarders, to go across disciplines and to reach segmentations of knowledge other than the disciplinary ones. This aim of semiotics comes in conflict with the existing system of education and with the existing bureaucracy of culture. Semiotics means transdisciplinarity, while the predominant mentality is still disciplinary. This is the reason why, when asked by the journal Degres to give them an article about semiotic education, I chose the title "Too Early for Teaching Semiotics", but obviously, we should take it cum grano salis. Implicit Versus Explicit Semiotics: Many people that we now consider brilliant semioticians, came to practice semiotic thinking on their own. Often they invent their own jargon such as von Uexküll. In this way there are many semioticians that are what could be considered implicit semioticians and their work is of great worth, while are already familiar with the great figures of explicit semiotics. Actually most of semiotics is of this implicit type. Professor Sebeok has referred to this as the Monsieur Jourdian factor; his first example in this respect was Harley C. Shands, who was stimulated by a lecture of Professor Sebeok, to realise that he was doing semiotics for a long time, without being aware of this. Harley Shands became one of the main figures in medical semiotics. What to Do With Semiotics?: In the nineteen fifties and sixties, semiotics had a delicate position in Eastern Europe, due to its strong connections with some fields of humanities and social sciences, suspected to be ideologically in opposition with the communist ideology. A shift in view was occurring towards information sciences and computer technology; with these new connections the communist power felt that is it would be good to stand behind this idea that there is a kind of technological revolution. Semiotics coupled itself with this information sciences and it continues to flourish. In terms of employment, in any profession you need to have a capacity to convince your audience that what you are doing is valuable and you need to be appreciated and this might be accomplished by insisting on creating a sense of fascination. I think that employment problems for students is about the same, for example, architecture students not all were getting jobs, some became successful and others not. You must make it your own, you must show that it is your own life. At the University of Toronto: I was invited there in , for the field of mathematical and computational linguistics by Professor Barron Brainerd, but I was also had teaching in the field of mathematical analysis. Before , Brainerd came to Romania spending a long time with me in relation with our common interest in mathematical linguistics and mathematical theatrology. I can say that I was a pioneer in mathematical computational linguistics. In Toronto, I had an opportunity to interact with the great geometer Coxeter, with Anatol Rapoport, a famous specialist who applied game theory to social sciences, with Lubomir Dolezel, an excellent specialist in the study of narrative structures, with the eminent psychologist Berlyne, with the specialist in circus semiotics Paul Bouissac. But I got invitations to many other Canadian universities, from Montréal to Vancouver and from London to Edmonton. After , I travelled extensively to interact with people and ideas, but for me this came very late. What is Semiotics?: There are things difficult
to be defined; among them: poetry, philosophy, mathematics and semiotics.
It may be interesting to observe that each of these fields is of an involutive
nature: it makes sense to speak of the poetry of poetry, the philosophy
of philosophy, the mathematics of metamathematics, the semiotics of semiotics.
By contrast, it makes no sense excluding a possible metaphoric use to
speak o f physics of physics, chemistry of chemistry or biology of biology. What Are Your Current Interests in Semiotics?: For several years I have been involved in the study of sign processes that take place in the new fields born in the twentieth century: quantum physics, relativity, computational biology, biological computation DNA computing, quantum computation, etcetera. There is a semiotic crisis pointed out by Niels Bohr in respect to language; he observed that human language, born and developed in the context of the macroscopic universe, is not adequate to cope with the phenomenon beyond the macroscopic universe. What Niels Bohr said about human language can be extended to semiosis in general. There is an increasing crisis of representation, visible not only in relation to the crisis of the subject/object distinction, but also with the iteration of the representation operator; this iteration marginalizes the intital object, placing it more and more in a shadow. The representation of the object becomes more and more a representation of another representation. This is my main semiotic concern today. Afterword: Commentary by the Author on the Formation and Development of the Interview Project Being aware and trying to understand what others are saying about the same thing, is essentially what the definition of what a sign is. That same thing or sign is the discipline/study/field/science of semiotics. To see what is being said about semiotics from different leaders in the field in the first person is one that is not readily found or written in academic texts, save say the forward, afterward or preface of a book. As a novice in the study of semiotics, it seemed that I ought to familiarise myself with the various presentations of semiotics around the world. Practically, this is possible, as the number of practising semioticians, in comparison to other social science disciplines such as say anthropology or psychology, are very few. Considering this demographic, the opportunity to engage in conversation with internationally known semioticians presents itself routinely at conferences and meetings, where most people who show an active interest in the subject will more than likely attend. It seemed a ripe moment to seize such an opportunity in the summer of , where I was invited to attend the Biosemiotics workshop "Uexküll and the Living Environment", June , University of Tartu and the International Summer Institute for Semiotic and Structural Studies June , Imatra, Finland. The purpose of creating a compilation
of interviews, is that it functions as a valuable resource, as an archive
for charting the ongoing narrative of semiotics. This was one of my questions
that motivated this project: the attempt to understand the connections,
the formations, of what we can now see globally as having places to study
and learn semiotics, or in general how we can see ideas being made . I
started with the question: who are these, intellectual figures that represent
the present state and flavour of the field? My approach to these interviews
was a simple one of curiosity. I played the role of myself. A student
from the University of Toronto who wanted to know about other semioticians
and semiotics programs around the world. For the most part, I let the
interviewee to express themselves as they liked, to hear the personal
narrative style of the teller. This to me is very important, as I believe
it makes the statement that intellectual knowledge does not spring fully
formed to be presented as if to say it exists and always will exist because
it is printed, weighted as an arching metanarrative. Rather, instead we
should be reminded of the tangible human experience and life that went
into knowledge creation, and that it continues to exist as a kind of living
and breathing entity, in pursuit of passion regardless of the title of
an individual. The selection of interviewees was arranged by email several months prior to the meeting . In order, the following are those semioticians that I have interviewed to date: / Peeter Torop: University of Tartu, Estonia From this list, it is hoped
that I can engage other semioticians in this project as I feel it is engaging
for students interested in the field. Furthermore, I think that other
professionals might find it fascinating to note what their colleagues
are highlighting as being of some importance, outside of conventional
discussion. Selection then, was of course based on the attendees of the
two meetings/conferences, but more importantly an eye was kept on the
kinds of issues that students might be of some concern i.e.: personal
development, pedagogical concerns and employment. / in a novel way . . . if semiotics was to be typified as something to be eaten, then what would make semiotics in your view be distinctive taste? what makes it different? this was suggested by Myrdene Anderson for unified conceptualisation purposes . . . in essence, an icebreaker. / trace the development of semiotics to the current state of semiotics at your university.. now what are/continue to be the important connecting lines in your view? / trace the development of yourself in semiotics . . . what were moments that were lasting impressions in your development/path towards or in semiotics? /pedigogical concerns / economical if not already stated political concerns practical applications/commercial applications outside of university, funding considerations / recommended readings in semiotics, or those that greatly influenced them / future concerns or other thoughts/concerns in summation In Interview: Such articles like that of
Charles Briggs - a social linguist, challenge the assumed primacy and
validity of the methodology of the interview method . I would like to
echo this to my own work. The interview method is by no means the voice
of truth. There is a temptation to equate the immediacy to the, however
this is erroneous. Recorded interviews were transcribed and then sent
back to the interviewee for editing. It must be also noted that several
of my esteemed interviewees and I entered into what metaphor researcher
Michael Reddy called a frame conflict: essentially, this is where a marked
struggle in communication occurs because of different conceptual contexts
or frames of the communicating parties, see Metaphor and Thought, "The
Conduit Metaphor A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language About Language".
It was my experience that there existed an anxious need to communicate
in a mutual culturally codified language, since we had difficulty understanding
metaphoric constructs of each other's cultural frameworks. On several occasions, I witnessed
Professor Sebeok recount with great fluidity and capacity a kind of narrative
genealogy of how and why in his opinion intellectual ideas were introduced,
sustained and surpassed. But, what I found wonderful was the ability by
which he mentioned the connections of minds that contacted each other.
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