From sémiologie to postmodernism: A genealogy

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to present the genealogy of neomodernism, as it starts with the Saussurean linguistic turn and was further elaborated by Russian Formalism and the Prague Circle, as well as by the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen with its leading figure Hjelmslev. Deely points to an actual overlapping between Peircian semiotics and the French tradition (the quest for a general theory of signs), an overlapping that acts as the background for the operations of comparison and replacement he performs. From this common root or summit, the two paradigms split and follow two totally different directions. The strong position of Deely that it is the (discontinuous) tradition starting with Augustine and reemerging with the “high semiotics” of the later “Latin” age that leads to “postmodernity,” as well as his view that Peirce (to whom he adds secondarily Heidegger), who takes over from the “Latins,” opens the fourth age of human understanding and is the last modern but also the first postmodern philosopher, comes as a surprise, because of the divergence of Deely's genealogy of postmodernism from the actual historical continuities. This divergence becomes even more striking if we take into account the almost total indifference of neomodernism to Peirce's ideas: replacement of the historical with the normative leads to an historical anachronism, because Deely is obliged to recess postmodernism about a century back, with the result of creating a philosophical postmodernism that contradicts historical postmodernism. What should be emphatically stated is that neostructuralism / neomodernism is not a partial theory, as Deely believes, but a global one that, contrary to Deely's view, subsumes natural under cultural signs, thus proposing a different global theory of signs from the Peircian one; this different theory is the only theory inseparably linked to neomodernity as an historical condition.