The works of Charles Peirce (1839-1914) and Jacques Lacan (1901-1981) are two major points of reference for the role of signification in language, identity, and thought. Positioning this somewhat philosophical review at the beginning of the seminar—Lacan will be our main topic for week 2—will make it possible for us to read the work of Žižek, Kraus, Kondo, and others with a more confident vocabulary and hopefully a stronger dose of intuition.
Peirce spent his whole life grappling with problems of signification, and in various ways defined the terms for the “linguistic turn” in 20th-century philosophy. Peirce was part of an American movement, sometimes called “Pragmatism”, who were profoundly skeptical of any objective notions of truth, and strived to break down boundaries between disciplines, in order to engage a more fluid production of knowledge. Among the important contributions of Peirce, not to be fully recognized until the late 20th-century, was to consider the realm of transactions between objects and the mind, and especially semiotic transactions, to be just as “real” as the independent nodes in that transaction.
Peirce wouldn’t accept the commonplace assumption that we begin with a mental entity like a self or a mind, existing in another entity called the world; likewise, he bypassed inquiries into the nature of the self and the nature of the world—basic concerns of European artists and philosophers for millenia. Why bypass those things? Because all evidence about them is hopelessly circular: we know that whatever we think about the world is given to us by the unique biases of the self, and we know that whatever we think about the self is given to us by an endless stream of unique contextual relationships to the world. Ironically, Peirce argued, the relationships themselves (i.e. the transactions between the mind and the things in the world) — which might seem more fluid or complicated — actually have a more objective reality. I can never be completely sure of whether a lighthouse is real or imaginary, or whether I, a boat pilot, am real or imaginary. But the nature of transaction between the lighthouse and the pilot is astonishly clear. The light is an indicator of the location of a shoreline; the light’s size and angle of inclination indicate my distance from the shoreline. The pilot might make an error, or misunderstand a lighthouse; the light might even present an illusion—these facts are still uncertain, but the means of indication (i.e. the nature of the transcation) can’t seriously be disputed. The abundance of these transactions is part of what inspires the work of Freud, Saussure, and Levi-Strauss. But Peirce’s work leaps in a different direction, in his frequent recognition that the mind is not a stable force, with signification eminating to and from it; instead, the mind itself is made up of its transactional activities. By challenging the primacy of “mind” and “world”, Peirce thus opened the door for a profound critical project that anticipates the post-structuralism of Lacan and Barthes.
Peirce, Charles (1931-58 [1894]). “What is a Sign?” Available at the Peirce Edition Project:
<http://www.iupui.edu/~peirce/ep/ep2/ep2book/ch02/ep2ch2.htm> (Transcribed from The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Ed. A. Burks, C. Harthshorne and P. Weiss. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard.)
Two other easy & effective resources on Peirce:
<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce-semiotics/>
<http://csmt.uchicago.edu/glossary2004/semiotics.htm>