Per Aage Brandt
On Consciousness and Semiosis
Abstract
I will here sketch out, in a basic model, based on simple schematic-semantic intuition,
the contours of an elementary scenario of the content of consciousness in animals like
ourselves. This model targets consciousness as I believe it evolved from mammals to
primates to Cromagnons, and then develops content structure in basic consciousness
from simple being-awake to higher and more human notions of self and reflexivity. It
includes elementary narrative structure and builds on step by step complexification
through increasing supply from memory and empathic information from other subjects.
It leads toward an architecture of canonical levels of consciousness and self versions;
and it takes us from constitutive semiotic structures to aesthetic and linguistic strata of
’being conscious’. The model has five strata; somewhere midway we are abandoned by
other species, primates or domestic animals, however trained.
Key words: consciousness, subject, self, other, object, actant, dynamics, ethics,
aesthetics, love, music, language, metonymy, index, icon, symbol.
1. The dynamics of basic consciousness.
In our present experience, that is, in the integrated perception of here-and-now
states of affairs in the outside world, offered to our consciousness when awake,
1
we are inscribed in two distinct forms of spatial organization, namely a frontal
angle of opening and orientation spanning from our sensing body and fanning
out toward possible objects of sensory attention – a schema evidently based on
the scope of vision – and a ’surround’ space in which we are situated as a mobile
entity in the middle of a stationary place – a schema most likely based on
auditive perception. In this sense, the ’presence of presence’ is a representation of
the following components (allowing the surround to be a square), fig. 1:
(O)
S
S
Subject surrounded by space
Subject ’intending’ Object
If these components are superimposed by a basic format in consciousness, we
will have a paradoxical formation which is both ’Olympic’ (seen from above’)
and ’Subjective’. The angle (or vantage) space and the surround space are
correlated, so that we can feel our own ’present presence’ as an installation,
typically with the angle as a foreground and the surround space as a
background; fig. 2:
(O)
S
S
S
Subject situated
and intending
2
The surround component does not, of course, just ’contain’ stationary and
unifrom Objects; the categories of different possible Objects in an elementary
presence representation, let us term it ’animal consciousness’, will most often be
cognized as partly manifested, only partly present, and mobile, animated,
intending, subjective – engaged in interactive contact and semiotic exchange with
the Subject of consciousness we are modelling. Object categories in animal
consciousness, in this sense, in our primary model, will typically include: preys
(O1), dangerous competitors or predators (O2), mates (O3), and these categories
will in turn be schematized as conscious, perceiving and intending, that is, as coSubjects. We will have to specify them by letting the Object horizon appear in
terms of ’windows’ in the present surround space, through which these
categories manifest significant parts of their enbodied and perceptually active
beings (fig. 3):
O1
prey
O2
danger
O3
mate
S
self
We obtain a primary dynamic portrait of elementary consciousness1 by
imagining the installation of subjectivity in such a primordial multi-subjective
1
The most elementary, semantically empty, meditative or vegetative state of conciousness that in principle
precedes this actantial drama is transformed into such a deictic and situational stage by the perceptive
3
drama, where an object category immediately will mean a type of imminent
interaction. In order for the Subject to take control of an attractive O1, for
example, it has to inhibit the action of an antagonistic O2 (targetting and
attempting to control either O1 or the Subject itself) and to interpret the attitude
of an ally O3 towards O1, O2, and the Subject itself. Situations will thus be rather
complicated already on this basic level.
Phenomenologically speaking, the surround space has ’walls’ and
’windows’. Instead of perceiving a prey, for instance, the Subject has to follow
traces of O1 that are causally produced indices of a proximal or distal being (e.g.
an animal hiding); the subjective attitude of intending is thus technically a matter
of attending to such causal signs. The relation from Subject to Object opens a
semiotic window in the wall of presence-space. The typical action schema of the
relation Subject–Object (S–O1) would be one of accessing/’taking’/incorporating
or otherwise ’holding’. A possible generalization could consist in associating this
schema with a Subject’s interpretation of percepts via attractive indexicality as
such, or rather, indexicality plus conjunction: an object relation program for
detecting, accessing, and ’getting hold of’.
The relation that the Subject has to establish with the antagonistic O2 may
be characterized as iconic; the manifestation of an antagonistic being prompts for
an image of (S–O1) (= ”I want to eat this one”), in which S maps onto O2 and O1
maps onto S (yielding the chiasmus S:O1 :: O2:S = ”I want to eat this one, but [::]
an antagonist-predator wants to eat me”), or else in which S maps onto O2 and
O1 onto itself (S:O1 :: O2:O1 = ”I want to eat this one, but the antagonist wants to
snap him from me”). The gesture of O2 toward S will therefore iconically
represent S–O1 either in one or in the other direction. Again, such an object
relation is semiotic, albeit by force of a different semiotic dimension, here what
we could call agonistic iconicity. The ambiguity of the mapping is an essential
identification and ’gestalting’ of Objects physically present or semi-present. Object detection makes use of
causal schemas interpreting ’things’ that move and possibly perceive, and possibly move because they
perceive; I assume that such schemas are active in states of being awake and ’focussed’.
4
aspect of the triangular drama S–O1–O2. The Subject may mimic O2’s attitude,
for example by staging a mock attack to scare O2 away; or else, S may mimic
O1’s attitude by fleeing.
We may presuppose such a semiotic drama as a standard condition in
which a mate, O3, that is, a conspecific being, finds and greets the Subject. O3
meets and greets S and cognizes the situation of S; likewise and inversely, S
cognizes some ways in which O3 will interpret S’s situation. The interaction
between S and O3 may include what we can call ’politeness’; S will gesture to O3:
”Please have a bite of O1, I can wait”. Or S will produce a political gesture :
”Please help me fight O2”. A conditional coupling of these ideas is
straightforward: ”IF you help me fight O2, THEN you can have a bite of O1”. A
conditional gesture is a sign of complicity. It signifies the proposition or
acceptance of the conditional realization of a non-actual, possible future scenario.
The Subject signifies its will (wanting) to achieve a certain change in a situation,
the Subject’s Other signifies its willingness to yield to this alien will. We are
dealing with a basic intentional phenomenon here, namely shared intentionality
(as a relation between wanting and willing). Interrogative gestures followed by
an affirmative or negative response are the elementary modes of this type of
interaction, which we can identify as symbolic. Polite-political and negotiationoriented gesturing are primary expressions of symbolicity in the intersubjective
framework of basic consciousness.
The above analysis gives us a dynamic-schematic picture of basic
consciousness as semiosis. There are many possible implications and
consequences of this view; we will briefly develop a cascade of effects that seem
to be the most immediate and immediately important of these.
2. The dimensions of memory in experience.
Perception has to be periodical, rhythmical. It cannot constantly process the same
sensory flow but has to scan rhythmically and ’update’ previous percepts
5
(process results), both in terms of surround space changes and Object-related
states of affairs. Even if the rhythm is as fast as E. Pöppel’s temporal ’window’2,
approximately 3 seconds long, it has to connect percepts already processed and
new percepts that ’update’ the former, and in this sense, it has to constitute both
a remembering and a ”remembered present”.3 How would this view of
perception as a process of immediate, non-volontary, automatic revision4 of our
’memories of here-and-now’, so to speak, translate into functions of
consciousness as semiosis?
Categorization of Objects, such as a prey or an otherwise attractive entity
(O1) that the Subject intends to ’take’; of the danger (O2) it seeks to avoid or
eliminate; or of the mate it wishes to negotiate with, is a form of recognition:
seeing something as something (and not something else) allows the Subject to
retrieve it under the distinct category, remembered as attached to a location to
where it should then orient its response. Object constancy, a fundamental
property of perception, is of course not a gift of the ’given’, but has to be
mentally achieved as re-cognition of some cognized entity under a constant (and
spatially localized) category: sameness of an individual as ’belonging to’ a
category remembered to appear at some location in the Subject’s surround
space.5 Categories are, in this view, localizers; they help the mind retrieve
individual Objects and interpreting them as ’same’ during the process of
perception and, subsequently, from one scene of perception to another. Humans
later superimpose language-based naming on categorization, and eventually
2
Pöppel 1997.
3
This expression is the title of Edelman 1989.
4
Short-term memory would correspond to such an involuntary, automatic updating, whereas long-term
memory would phenomenologically correspond to (non-rhythmic) voluntary recall, intentional recollection.
5
Literature on categorization has not hitherto paid sufficient attention to the spatial meaning of categories, I
think. An object only IS something as a function of its position in some space, and originally in presence
space.
6
manage to share categorical paradigms, which leads to an expansion of the
mental capacity of identifying and holding knowledge of individuals in
experience; but when categorical knowledge is held as ’semantic’, it loses its
spatial meaning.
If the Subject’s interaction with O1 is maintained over longer time
intervals than those allowing automatic categorical recall, the Subject will appeal
to experiences of scenes involving {O1}, i. e. objects of O1’s category6, experiences
of dealing with ”this kind of things”. The recollections coming to mind will
involve notions of formerly experienced {O1} properties – semantic attributes, we
would call them – and ideas, or traces, bodily markers, of the Subject’s own
actual reactions to {O1} – procedural recall.7 The result is optimally a combined
procedural and semantic attitude of the Subject: a certain bodily disposition and
a corresponding mental (propositional) orientation. In the O1 window, O1 is now
a sign (token) of this semantico-procedural meaning of {O1} (as its type).
O2 may be categorized and subcategorized as well; here, recall includes
the experience of the animated Object’s own view of the Subject, as ’guessed’ by
the Subject: a view of the situation as seen from this Other, and empathically
theorized by the Subject. We remember what we believe that Others – and
especially antagonistic Others – experience when they encounter ourselves in a
situation of intending. {O2}, let us say, the category of a given sort of opponents,
will be able to see both S and O1, and the relation S–O1, as parts of a drama
involving itself and a relation to Objects or Others. At least in principle, the
Subject will register this aspect of the situation and be able to recall it as a
narrative version (the enemy’s view) of the simple constellation S–O1. This
version is potentially narrative, in so far as both actants, S and O1, can be
equipped with a certain time depth in this representation. S, seeing itself though
6
I write {X} to refer to sets of elements of the category X.
7
Tulving 1984 suggested the distinction between three memory systems in long-term memory: episodic,
semantic, and procedural. This list has become a standard reference in memory literature.
7
the putative eyes of O2 as Other, therefore sees more than it did though just
recognizing the surround space and the Objects in it. The Subject is thus an entity
slightly more complex then the initial simply-being-there, now a narrativized
self.
Seeing oneself through Others seeing oneself, and remembering this
alloscopic vision, is essential to consciousness on higher levels. The interaction
with O3 is significant in this respect. This Other will be able to decide if and to
what extent S is in danger; if so, all things equal, it will itelf be implied in the
scenario as a ’helper’, or in narratological terms, an ’adjuvant’ actant.8 For the
Subject to enter in contact with the ’helper’ is to imagine itself being the helper
(of someone like the Subject). If the Subject’s gesture towards O3 means ”help
me!”, it generically also means ”...as I would of course help you, if you were in
my shoes”.9 This reversibility is, I think, primordially built into the empathic and
theoretical mental contact competence of the Subject. In this (symbolic)
communication, the self of the Subject thus acquires yet another aspect: an ethical
dimension.
To summarize, so far: the situational Subject is first narrativized (by O2)
and then ’ethicalized’ (by O3), especially if the categorization of O3 lets the
Subject recall experiences of {O3} Others, adjuvants actants, respecting or failing
to respect this generic ’convention’ of helping. The distinctive feature of the
ethical self, resulting from recognizing the situation from O3’s position is that a
Subject is seen as undergoing a crisis, and in principle, an encounter with the
possibility of dying. Ethics and death (the possibility of the death of the Other)
are semantically inseparable.
Cf. Greimas’ canonical actant model, in Greimas 1966, has six functions: Subject, Object, Addressor,
Addressee, Opponent, Adjuvant.
8
9
Several philosophers have seen this generic inter-adjuvancy, including Emmanuel Lévinas (Lévinas 1982)
and the great Danish thinker K. E. Løgstrup (Løgstrup 1957): ”Den enkelte har aldrig med et andet
menneske at gøre, uden at han holder noget af dets liv i sin hånd”. [An individual never deals with another
human being without holding a part of the life of this being in his hand].
8
The Subject can mentally leave its initial position and identify with its
Others, O2 or O3. It will then be able to recall situations where it was de facto an
O2 (opponent) or an O3 (adjuvant) of some other Subject. This is a major source
of consciousness as thinking beyond purely presentical perception; human ’online’ perception itself is colored by imagination, that is, by ’off-line’ versions of
intersubjective spaces introduced iconically, through O2, or symbolically,
through O3, in that we partly escape, so to speak, through their windows in our
own presence space. Similarity (iconicity) and contiguity (symbolicity) are, as
Roman Jakobson suggested, semiotically basic connectors. They are, I wish to
add, windows through which our consciousness can reach more reality than
meets the eyes and ears of present experience. Such reality is offered by, and
therefore dependent on, the Subject’s memory, which adds depth and resonance
to the present contents, by virtue of these vital actantial connections. We think
through Objects and Others.
To summarize again: the semiotic outreach of consciousness determines
the complexity of the Subject as a self: first, it acquires narrative substance and
second, an elementary ethical dimension – which is probably also what we feel is
a constitutive feature of a Subject’s ’inner life’. To feel ’responsible’ is to ’feel’,
tout court, in the sense of having ’feelings’, or affects, including emotions,
moods, and passions.10 Hence, to feel Others’ feelings in the present is to begin,
as an infant, to have this ’inner life’, characteristic of higher ’selves’.
3. Singularity, metonymy, and art.
Human Subjects equipped with an ’inner life’ in this sense develop the
concept of a critical condition of self and Other as a matter of personal being, or
’personhood’: we attend to the singularity of the vulnerable Other; the singular,
particular, individual One-ness of the Other as a self-identical entity, in so far as
10
I distinguish moods, emotions, and passions in the following way: short term feelings that have anecdotal
motives and, correspondingly, have marked onsets and gestural or face expressions, are emotions; daylong
background feelings are moods; and lifelong feelings about persons or activities are passions.
9
this Person is One and only One, exposed to dangers in unique situations that we
may happen to witness. Persons as unique beings have proper names that signify
their uniqueness. This symbolic phenomenon is strong enough to allow
inversion: non-human entities that are given proper names are treated as unique
persons.11
Phenomenologically, consciousness is primarily situational, secondarily
narrative, and tertiarily, ethical. These three ’layers’ follow from the mnemonic
semiosis of O1 (causal), O2 (iconic), and O3 (symbolic), respectively. Based on the
cognitive singularity effect of personhood, the forth ’layer’ of consciousness will
further unfold affectivity.
The transformation of O1 – as Object of the Subject’s affective attraction
and quest – into a singular individual, a unique being beyond classification or
categorization, occurs, in the case of persons, typically when this Object has
already been experienced by the Subject as an O3, an adjuvant. The singular
Object of passionate interest, on behalf of the Subject, is believed to be a highly
responsible, ethical person. If the passional O1 is not a person, it is, I postulate,
an aspect of a person, a part, a product, a trace, a sign, any metonymical
representative of the person. Metonymy12 is essentially the cognitive logic of
personhood; this well-known rhetorical trope is really a cognitive process as
deeply rooted in the human mind as the concept of Person: a self, understood as
a Person, transcends any bodily reference (you are not ’just’ your body), because
it is determined metonymically as the abstract or ideal referent of all accessible
indices of the individual. This metonymic referent is, I believe, the source of
singularity. We think pragmatically in terms of social status, professional
identity, ethnic affiliation etc., all related to metonymy; we spend our lives trying
to leave traces that can be read in some specific direction, as indications of our
11
This is the case of pet animals. They become un-eatable for the same reason.
By metonymy I understand plain simple formulae like: ”Shakespeare is on the shelf”, meaning a volume
containing his plays – works referring to their author. Shakespeare is of course ’more’ himself in his art
than in his body. Metonymy defies death.
12
10
’essence’ – this is what existentialists have referred to as ’creating yourself’, and
the Sartrian principle according to which ’existence precedes essence’. But
metonymy can flow backwards from the referent to its signs, so that these inherit
the value or force attributed to their source; this is probably what is happening in
aesthetics. Our appreciation of the formal ’beauty’ of artistic expressions are
determined by inverse metonymy, letting the signs and the referent enter a loop
of inter-reference between ’form’ and ’meaning’ (the latter in the sense of
”someone meaning to do or express something by forms”). Works of art are
metonymic expressions of something (apparently valuable) characterising their
creators, but once these creators have obtained acknowledgement from a group
of human Subjects, the artistic expressions themselves – and sometimes even the
trivial life details – become Objects of intense perception, and even worship, in
their own right; these expressions receive proper names (titles) and are
experienced as singular and unique. They are recognized and ’loved’, as
examples of great art – or simply as fetiches or relics, marked by an aura of
sacredness.
Human love, the level of consciousness we have to situate as
superordinate in relation to the ethical level, may well be of exactly this sort: it is
a long-term feeling that flows from signs towards the beloved person but
necessarily also backwards, from the person to its signs. The ’beauty’ of the
beloved is of the same semiotic kind as the ’beauty’ of the work of art. It is the
inverse-metonymic energy flowing from the objectivated person toward its acts,
gestures, properties, traces, communicated thoughts, belongings, characteristics
in general.
A dramatic and evolutionarily important supplement to this hypothesis
on the role of metonymy has to be introduced here. Since the appearances of a
beloved person are appreciated as forms, they are of course iconically efficient:
forms are copied into other forms, that refer to the former forms; but the latter
will then neutralize the singularity, the uniqueness, of the ’original’, that is, its
11
aesthetic core characteristic. The copier is an agent of the category {O2} wanting
to be the unique passional O1 for some (multiple) Subject. The copier, and thus
the developer, the formally creative agent, is an artistic agent, and is a Subject
who tries to ’steal’ someone’s love from someone else. He is an artist – the
psychology of artists often literally confirm this general determination, the
presence of a disposition to paradoxically be ’more original than some original’
in order to attract some preexisting ’love’ (attention, interest, recognition, a
certain aura of sacredness pertaining to ’belovedness’). The artistic form of
consciousness thus has traits of ’evil’, we could say.13 The field of love as mode of
consciousness thus leads us from ethics to aesthetics, and from ’good’ to ’bad’ or
’evil’ intentions and deeds. Art is unethical behavior.
4. Levels of consciousness. Consciousness in language.
The semiotics of consciousness builds on the sign status of objects of conscious
attention. The levels of consciousness and selfhood we identify on
phenomenological grounds can be directly derived from the structural properties
of the basic semiotic design of conscious scenarios. These levels are thus not
really of a ’higher order’ of cognition but may instead be understood as aspects
of certain intentional processes that are inherent in the basic design.
The Objectal syntax – O1, O2, O3 in the space of the Subject – is actantial
in the dynamic sense we have briefly explored.14 In the Subject’s perspective, O1
is an attractor, O2 is an antagonist, O3 is an adjuvant, and these instances meet in
one and the same space.
The Subject interacts with its Objects and remembers itself as seen from
their point of view – as cognized in their perspective, by their consciousness. This
13
Cf. Bataille 1957, discussing relations between literature and evil, in particular with reference to Marquis
de Sade and Baudelaire.
There may be many other Object categories in a Subject’s basic conscious space, but the ones
foregrounded here as dynamic and actantial appear to be doing elementary and indispensable work for a
semantics of thinking and feeling, so there are reasons to believe that they are indeed fundamental.
14
12
is of course a strong claim; I tend to defend this idea from a Peircean (abductive)
stance: if we stipulate this to be true, then some given problems we wish to
understand and develop become accessible to our understanding. We
presuppose that Subjects interact in so far as they participate in each other’s
conscious scenarios. Since these scenarios share the same format, intersubjective
interaction therefore does not have to be chaotic, even if it can be highly
conflictive and driven by misunderstandings. Subjects inherently ’know’ that
they are each other’s actants. They can categorize each other as specified actants,
and they can occasionally or regularly agree to a shared status of Subjects, {S}, in
a shared story or project.
The first levels of consciousness follow from such intersubjective and
actantial identifications: ”if you are my O2 now, then I am you in my immediate
and perceptive imagination, so I can see myself as I still am as Subject, as if it
were you ...” – This curious ”... I am you ...” operation in the human mind has
been amply commented in mental space and blending theory15, and there is little
doubt that it plays a major role in human imagination and communication; here,
I am only adding two aspects: it is crucial to basic consciousness, and it is crucial
to the function of memory in perception, imagination, consciousness in general.16
However, in order to dispose of a minimal model of the stratified
structure of elementary human consciousness, built on a primordial model of
animal consciousness, as we have seen, we need to explore the possibility of
identifying a slightly more complex, fifth level or stratum: a linguistic level of
consciousness.
The use of language presupposes the ethical, loving, aesthetic, and either
generous or malignant attitude to forms in content. Language tells stories that
15
Turner 1996 is a particularly significant early manifestation of this study of the counterfactual,
conditional, highly complex but intuitively simple operation as an indispensable cognitive phenomenon.
16
So this would be my humble addition to Glenberg’s view of memory in perception (Glenberg 1997).
13
serve the urge to imitate, simulate, steal beauty or redirect love: slander, gossip17,
is apparently a grounding function of language use in all cultures; but these
stories can also serve the ’law’, the restoration of truth, the project of justice, the
instauration of respect, etc. – all against the (presupposed) malignant tendency.
Language creates opposing semantic representations of versions of states of
affairs; it does not directly represent a Subject’s monistic perspective. It is
inscribed in a dialogical ’discourse’, a diatribe, an unending polemic debate
between versions and evaluations of ’what happens’ that constantly imply
differing and conflicting actantial voices. Linguistic enunciation18, the structure
of persons, voices, viewpoints, modes, temperatures, etc. in the grammatical
organization of human language in sentences as utterances, is a result of this
underlying linguistic polyphony, not only in its use but in the core of its
constructionality.19
The most striking fact of enunciation is probably the ’Olympic’
phenomenon: the fact that we can talk ’objectively’ and state what is the case
about a state of affairs without having to specify our own actantial involvement
as interactively cognizing speakers. We most often use this neutral mode of what
I would like to call linguistic consciousness: ”the truth is that ...” It is a totally
disembodied mode of stating positive or negative facts; from nobody’s point of
view in particular something just is the case, ’objectively’ ... Here the primordial,
objective surround space itself apparently acquire a voice and speaks, using the
core copula verb to be. Latin: ESSE. Language is apparently coextensive with the
very space of presence; it can therefore speak, describe, predicate, evaluate,
17
See for example Jaworski and Coupland 2005 on ’othering’.
French term (énonciation, ”*uttering”, versus énoncé, ”utterance”) introduced by Benveniste 1966,
hitherto not further developed in anglophone linguistics, designating the realm of signified subjectivity in
language: morphological indicators of personhood, first-person, second-person pronouns, determiners,
demonstratives, shifter adverbs, modal adverbs, tense, mode, aspect, speaker-addressee relation markers,
and the semantic variations thus expressed, to manifest the presence of ”l’homme dans la langue”.
Enunciation can be determined as the structural properties of a sentence that prepares it for being integrated
in a form or genre of discourse.
19
Embedding of clauses in clauses thus reflect the uptake of things said in things said about them.
18
14
without signifying or specifying a speaker. Or rather, the sound of the space in
which contents (states, events, acts) take place becomes language that affirms its
objective content – and the actual speaker appears as an appendix to this voice of
’spatial truth’, the unembodied voice of ’what is’.
We may ask how it is possible that language can express the existence,
state, and essence of things without referring to a subjective anchoring of such
expressions. How did humans happen to develop such an impersonal form of
consciousness – paradoxically, the expression of an unembodied consciousness,
to be experienced through language as a ’voice of truth’. The sound of things
themselves ...
The answer, I think, lies in an experience of shared time. What time is it?
(ESSE). It is this or that time for all subjects co-present. Time fills the space of
presence as a shared atmosphere. In human evolution, time only acquires this
generic status in so far as it is symbolized in a musical or calendaric metric, based
on numeric and personalized names of beats and slots in time. The shared now is
a metrically determined moment in an either musical or chronological sense. It is
highly probable that music and chronology were directly and constitutionally
interconnected in the mindset of our early ancestors. Time was sung and played;
watchmen’s hour songs give us an idea of the ’music of nights and days’ as an
early temporal symbolization, whose micro-format is music, and whose macroformat would be the calendaric expansions of the concept of universal time slots
into named hours, days, weeks, months, years, cycles etc. Truth and time still
coincide in sentence grammar: many epistemic adverbs or adverbials are
universally used to specify both (always, sometimes, never; seldom, often; once,
twice; one fine day ...).
The mode of consciousness that allows us the speak ’olympically’, and
thus to describe, judge, evalute things, states, events, acts, from nobody’s point of
view, is a creation of language, or is even what creates language. This voice can
of course be personalized emphatically, but simple sentences are most often still
15
as neutral as they are simple: ”It rains”. The linguistic creation must in its turn be
based on rhythmic symbolization, possibly music and (ritual) dance. Otherwise
”It rains” could not mean ”It rains now (here)”.
This ultimate mode or level of consciousness has had explosive impact on
the communal life of our species. It has allowed us to develop technologies,
deontologies, historiographies, philosophies, and, lately, sciences. Religions can
be seen as attempts to repersonalize the impersonal (”It rains” -> Tlaloc20 rains”).
A vertical architecture of form of consciousness and corresponding
versions of selves and others would look like the following graph, representing
five distinct levels and five semiotic instances that may have made possible the
transitions from a lower to a higher stage (fig. 4):
(5)
linguistic consciousness (self: ”I”, ”you”, ”we”... versus ”it”)
–––––––––––musical cognition––––––––––––––––
(4)
aesthetic consciousness (self: Name, metonymy)
–––––––––––erotic cognition [love]––––––––––––
(3)
ethical consciousness (self: responsible Person)
–––––––––––symbolic cognition–––––––––––––––
(2)
narrative consciousness (self: Actant)––––––––––
–––––––––––iconic cognition––––––––––––––––––
(1)
situational consciousness (self: Subject)––––––––
–––––––––––indexical cognition–––––––––––––––
(0)
20
SIMPLE BEING AWAKE
Aztec rain god.
16
Once the linguistic form of consciousness is achieved, through the semiotic,
phenomenological, affective evolution of our species, this particularly
lightweight (impersonal, disembodied) mode is immediately applied to the
underlying, heavier modes (of embodied consciousness). So we invent (4) an art
based on language (poetry, literature); we develop (3) moral discourses; we (2)
tell stories, anecdotes, create myths; and (1) we simply chat and twitter about
everyday events. We could easily get the idea that all this is instead due to
language, and that therefore language and consciousness are coextensive, or even
somehow identical. We then need to remember that it cannot rain on level (1).
5. Concluding remarks.
Consciousness is representation – in the sense that is represents ’semantically’
something which does not look like anything before we perceive it – but the
paradox is that we must experience it as identical to the world around us. Even
our so-called ’inner life’ is only accessible to us in so far as we are able to ’read’ it
off of the signifying entities around us; we cannot ’read inwards’. We can of
course have ’thoughts’, which occurs when presents things around us signify
them to us. The nearest we come to having an authentically internal inner life is
having recollection-driven thoughts, triggered by the proprioceptive impulses
that drive recollections and thus fuel our imaginary proceses altogether.
The aspects of the world around us that, as my metaphor says, ”trigger”
our imaginary processes are what we call signs. The bridges between mind and
matter are precisely these significant aspects of the perceivable part of material
reality. Mundus sensibilis becomes a mundus intelligibilis, to use the scholastic
terminology, only when the cognitive apparatus allows a semiotic interpretation
17
of occurrences. Therefore the semiotic functions of consciousness can be
considered the keys to the study of our mind.21
*
Appendix on domain-based sign types.
In my latest published volume (Brandt 2004, chapter 3), I postulated the existence
of four basic domains of experience. From the point of view of language, these
entities are semantic domains; from that of elementary cognition, they represent
the 'sorts of reality' that the human mind is prepared to distinguish for all
purposes of thinking and acting.
A physical domain (D1) that the newborn child must set up as the causal
reality of material things around it, among which its hands (and soon, its body)
will navigate; and a social domain (D2) that it has to anticipate as an intentional
reality of animated beings that circulate around it and react to its own
expressions. Furthermore, a mental domain (D3) of sensations (pain, pleasure),
feelings (dysphoric, euphoric), inner visions (dreams, wants, fears), that it has to
distinguish from the outer realities; and an empathic domain (D4) springing from
the latter, and containing (paradoxical) experiences of sharing inner feelings,
thoughts, wishes and fears, and having mutual affinities (love, amusement).
The developmental (ontogenetic) differentiation22 of these basic domains may be
represented by a flow graph as the following (fig. 1):
21
Due to facts of the history of ideas, psychology has been and still mainly is alien to semiotics, maybe for
institutional reasons. Markel 1998 recapitulates some attempts made in the first part of the last century. The
title of his book now sounds like an oxymoron.
22
The social domain is distinguished from the physical, as soon as the infant perceives
the difference between things and people; then feelings 'within' may differentiate both
from things and people; and feelings 'within' other people will finally appear as relevant,
when the infant begins to grasp the signals of the emotional state of at least a few
privileged persons (mother, other children, father ...). There are of course other
possibilities of differentiation. Later in individual development, the four domains will
18
D2 (social)
D1
(Physical)
D3 (mental)
D4 (empathic)
In all of these basic domains, the Subject must experience events and in these
events encounter gestalts that in some ways 'stand for' or manifest the presence
of Objects. If we accept to see these gestalts as signifiers and their Objects as
signifieds, we will be able to identify an elementary array of signs that a human
mind will universally recognize in its conscious life, namely physico-causal signs
(in D1), socio-conventional signs (in D2), mental signs (in D3) and empathic signs
(in D4). The mental signs are what we call representations. The empathic signs
are intentional in the sense of being produced intentionally as motivated by
being perceived as intentional, that is, in the sense of being 'negotiated' in an
interpersonal face-to-face situation of expressive exchange. While socioconventional signs are experienced as addressing 'you' as a second person, and
mental signs are experienced exclusively in the first person, only empathic signs
are experienced as both addressing 'you' and presenting a first person who, as an
'I' addresses a' you'; these signs thus come with a fullblown first-person-secondperson enunciation as in language.
stay distinct and be the phenomenological fundament of higher-level domain
constitutions and distinctions.
19
I would like to suggest that the category of socio-conventional signs be
seen as equivalent to the class of so-called symbolic signs. These are instructions
given by an impersonal collective instance, addressing an individual Subject.
When exchanged between individual Subjects, they let the 'signing' Subject be an
embodied representative of the collective instance they are issued by. This is the
case of gestures of politeness.
I would further suggest to see the category of empathic signs as equivalent
to the traditional class of iconic signs. Images are immediately readable and
graphically feasible by humans, so they do not have to be socially
conventionalized, before they can have meaning as images of something to
someone. Immediate understandings, on the other hand, must be iconic in order
to function before they are conventionalized. This is the case of 'spontaneous'
iconic gestures not yet conventionalized by sign language of followed up by
phonetic language.
Our model of minds that perceive, remember, and communicate, will
differentiate both by basic domains and by temporal orientations, which will
localize domain-specific contents in the present, in the past or in the future of the
perceiving or communicating Subject(s), given that minds unfold temporal
orientations and apply them to contents of domain-specific experiences. We will
find a distribution corresponding to the following bidimensional array (fig. 2):
TIME
FORCE
Past
Present
Future
FORCE
= causal or
indexical
"signs" and
apodictic
force
20
D1
"signs"
of physical
states of
affairs
D2
social,
conventional
signs
D3
mental
signs,
representations
D4
intentional,
empathic
signs
TRACES
MONUMENTS
RECOLLECTIONS
SYMPTOMS
SIGNALS
THOUGHTS
OMENS
FIGURES
(digitals)
= arbitrary,
symbolic
signs with
deontic force
= imaginary,
conceptual,
inner "visions"
EXPECTATIONS
with epistemic
force
PORTRAITS
MAPS
DIAGRAMS
= iconic
descriptions
and suggestions with
speech-act
force
These twelve elementary slots, which follow from a crossmapping of domains
and deictico-temporal23 values, can be filled with sign type indications of which
the above are only examples. The semiotic grid resulting from this analytic
operation does not, of course, exhaust the determination, or serve as an
exhaustive definition, of the sign types in question.
The content of immediate consciousness is evidently the surrounding
world, with its default instances, including ourselves and a series of
precategorized Objects. Maybe it will be possibloe to say that the classical
Subject–Object axis corresponds to a D3–D1 (mind-to-matter) orientation, and
that D2 (symbolic) and D4 (iconic) intervene as two sorts of Others that the
Subject has to confront: the 'fellows' and the 'significant other', as ennemi or
23
These temporal values are deictic in the sense of being based on a here-and-now, from
where gestures point toward a there-and-then (past) and a where-and-when (future). They
are not sequential (before/after).
21
other-in-erotic-intimacy (in both cases, seduction is crucial, and iconicity is the
predominant semiotic mode).
In this case, elementary consciousness already contains, at least in embryo,
an integration of domains, distinct modes of being, ontological styles of reality,
that a Subject will further explore and understand through its individual life. The
developing mind is an integrative monist but at the same time a disintegrative or
differentialistic and pluralistic metaphysician knowing of irreducible and often
mutually conflictive modes of being, and, thus, knowing that to be awake and
conscious, by definition, is to be in trouble.
*
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23