What is a sign?
In order to understand the subtleties, implications, and dangers of semiurgy – the manipulation of signs to affect the inner and outer worlds of the semiurgist – we must first establish a firm ground for the ontology of signs themselves.
At its most basic level, a sign is that which refers to an object other than itself – physical objects, concepts, ideas, etc. – and which has been interpreted to infer some sense of what the sign “means” in a particular context.
An object contrasts with a subject (the organized system, sentient or not, that interprets the sign). A person reading these words (i.e., linguistic signs), a tick responding to the presence of the mammal-indicating chemical butyric acid, or a computer CPU unpacking the contents of a network packet: all are equally subjects, but not all are capable of self-directed flexibility in the substance and outcome of their interpretations. Some interpretations are hardwired – literally in the case of the CPU following its coded instructions, instinctively [code carried by DNA] in the case of the tick. Other interpretations arise out of social conventions and learned behavior, or are created anew with each encounter with a sign or sign network.
Both the object and the subject are, or at least can be, equally real, but subjects are always limited in their capacity for knowing the true nature of objects since that knowledge must be mediated through signs. This is true even when the subject becomes the object of their own interpretation and signification. More on this point below.
Semiosis – the reception and interpretation of signs – has no human bias, although certain kinds of signs (variously called symbolic or unmotivated) can only be interpreted and assigned meaning by humans.
Referents and their revealed meaning
The referent is what the sign points to in some way. This reference can be derived from an inferred causal relationship – as in the peal of a bell indicating that a bell is nearby – or in the case of unmotivated/symbolic signs the reference is largely acausal. Expanding on a causal example, the sound of the bell is perceived by the interpreter (the subject hearing the bell), who then determines based on their familiarity with such sounds that the source was a bell that has been struck. That is, the intepretation completes a causal chain that can be traced back to the striking of the bell and elucidated through the sign. None of this, however, suggests anything about what the ringing of the bell means in the context in which it is interpreted; it is merely a conclusion about the source that has caused the sign to be available for interpretation.
The meaning – significance – of a sign such as the ringing of a bell is unfixed (or arbitrary). This type of arbitrariness refers to the lack of inherent or fixed causal connection between the sign and its meaning; this meaning cannot be completely changed at will, but the meaning can and inevitably does naturally shift over time depending on the evolution of the ways the sign is created and interpreted. The easiest example to understand here is the way that words – linguistic signs – can shift in their meaning or take on new senses of meaning; e.g., “awful” once meant “capable of inspiring awe” but now is – perhaps ironically – generally only an emphatic way of saying “bad”.
The significance of the ringing of the bell depends on a variety of factors: the context in which the bell is heard, the experiences and biases of the interpreter, social conventions, and the intent behind the striking of the bell, just to name a few – many of these factors will additionally assume significance at a level below conscious or deliberate thought. Because all these factors and more will vary, the precise significance of the sound of a bell will vary depending on person and context. The meaning is both uncertain (because it is only given tentative certainty by the participants hearing it in a specific time and place) and arbitrary (because not every interpreter will arrive at precisely the same interpretation, even within the same context). Since there is not a definitive, repeatable chain of causality with the meaning of this (or any other) unmotivated – symbolic – sign, the reference of such signs is thus largely acausal. This will be vitally important in future discussions of the relationship between semiurgy – the creation and modification of signs – and what has been traditionally but often imprecisely termed magic.
The Necessity of Interpretation
A sign is only a sign once it has been interpreted; some meaning or significance has been attached to the sign or to the encounter with the sign. A potential sign, such as a loud noise, becomes a sign only once it has been supposed to have come from a gun shot, an animal, a falling tree, etc. The manner in which a sign progresses from attracting our attention, then to being identified, and finally to being assessed for its significance (meaning within a context) can be described through C.S. Peirce’s ordinal qualities of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness. These crucial qualities will be discussed in a near-future essay as they form the crux of the hidden power of semiotics (and by extension, semiurgy) to reveal the inner workings of cognition and to affect the phenomenal world through the signs used to intrepret objects in that world and their interactions.
Reflexivity
The twentieth-century American linguist Charles Hockett noted thirteen (later sixteen) “design principles” of language delineating a set of criteria that all human languages demonstrate. Some of these criteria are also evident to greater or lesser extent in non-human animals, but a crucial subset is only present in human linguistic communication. Future blog posts will address all of these design features, but for the moment the essential one to investigate is reflexivity: the ability to use language to talk about language. As language is a subset of semiotics, discussion of reflexivity is ultimately also a discussion of semiotics – using signs to understand signs – and as such the objects of discussion can be extended beyond only linguistic signs (words [written, spoken, or signed], communicative gestures).
Another way to frame reflexivity is that it is the turning of language (or more broadly, semiosis) inward: treating subjects as objects themselves. This emphasizes the unfixed relationship between subjects and objects. Some recent and somewhat controversial trends in philosophy, such as object-oriented ontology, take this even further in an attempt to dispense with the distinction beween subject and object entirely (or perhaps more accurately, advocate for removing the privilege implicit in distinguishing a subject as something fundamentally different from an object).
Through reflexivity, we can use signs to uncover and describe the structure of signs, describe signs in terms of other signs, and share (and discuss) these meta-signs (and meta-networks of signs) with others. This is the same mechanism through which subjects can analyze, reflect upon, or even create change within themselves; following the precept ultimately Kantian in its origin that all knowledge of all objects is mediated through signs, this interpretation by the interpreter (subject) itself must in this case treat that subject as another object. Even though this twist of perception may occur internally, the internal object of interpretation is in effect treated as if it were external or somehow separate from the interpreter itself – only in this way can it be mediated through signs.
We do this type of mediation through signs all the time as part of perceiving and quantifying our internal states. We – intentionally or not – become aware of aspects of how we feel – physically, emotionally, as part of mood – and treat those as signs to interpret and then from that interpretation form a mental representation of that sign network and its significance. We treat this as part of ourselves, but in reality the distance between the source of the signs and our interpretation of them still ultimately renders those sign sources as external to the interpretative faculty and thus objects that we engage with as if they were still somehow external (and thus somehow disconnected from the intepreting subject).
Sign Networks Folding Back on Themselves
The enclosed perspective on mediation through signs takes us back to the concept of semiurgy itself. By creating new signs and combining them in new ways, we can open gateways toward affecting the manner in which signs mediate our interpretations of both the psychecentric world (the inner perception of Being) and the phenomenal world (the world of objects outside the self arising from and acted on by processes).