Of “subjection”, or Crisis of semiotics

Abstract

Can semiotics theorise subjectivity? Since all communicated signs are framed by enunciation, inter-subjectivity is presupposed in semiosis, because it structures its deictic relations; but can subjectivity as such — which is a matter of cognitive psychology and phenomenology, both existential and formal — still be considered as an entity pertaining to the domain of meaning and semiosis? In this note, I present the hypothesis that semioses of different kinds gravitate around a constitutive column of meaning-making spanning from perception and symbolic-performative meaning through cogito-epistemic and diagrammatic meaning to memory and iconic-libidinal meaning. This psycho-semiotic system organizes subjectivity and orients it towards the ecological stratification of the socio-sphere, which offers the same semiotic instances, and towards communicative intersubjectivity. The opportunity to outline this psycho-semiotic architecture was given by a later de-published article in which subjectivity was derived from the semiotic generative process, and which according to my view was in trouble, as a constitution of the subject, due to its lack of ontological connections to studies of cognition and the embodied mind.